Congratulations on your new toy!

The car docking sled has a microphone connector (assuming your installers didn't cut it off-- some installers have been known to do that sort of thing).

This connector isn't currently used. In the future, it will be used for voice-recognition software. But in the meantime, there have been discussions about using it for road-noise-based volume control. You know, use a small, cheap microphone to sample the ambient noise from, say, the engine compartment, and scale the volume accordingly.

To do it, someone would have to write what's known as a kernel hack, a third-party rewrite of the empeg's boot kernel. This isn't as complicated as it sounds, actually, other kernel hacks have already been done.

Since people have already talked about doing the noise-based-volume before, I'm surprised no one has done it yet. Anyone want to give it a whirl?

In the meantime, there's another kernel hack already available that you might want to try. It's called the "Volume Adjustment Kernel", or "Voladj" for short, and it's essentially a dynamic compressor. It increases the volume on quiet musical passages so they can be heard above the car's noise floor. This isn't exactly the same as what you're requesting. Voladj isn't based on the car noise, it's based on how quiet the song is at any given moment. Richard Lovejoy (its author) has mentioned the idea of integrating Voladj and some sort of microphone-based system together into one kernel hack, although it has not been done yet.

For mor information on installing kernel hacks, please read the entry in the FAQ forum of this BBS called "How do I put custom logos or kernels into my player?".

Also, you can do a search on this BBS for "picker and voladj for dummies", which is a slightly more complicated trick allowing the empeg to boot with a menu that allows you to select whether voladj is turned on or off.

Again, welcome, and congratulations on your new toy.

___________
Tony Fabris