Well, I am the one who mentioned the MP Shuttle so I guess I will review the thing.

It is actually a pretty neat device. For a little over $400 (from the US distributor, www.xeenontech.com) I got the hard drive based unit. You must supply your own hardrive (standard 3.5 inch). It does not include a radio and is intended to be plugged into an aux input on your stereo or one of those little FM transmitter units. The unit expects to find between 1 and 20 partitions on the hard drive formatted as Fat 16 or Fat 32. It will scan each of these partitions for mp3s. You can jump back and forth between the partitions so that they can act as dividers. It supports directories, but only one level deep and they act more as bookmarks than true directories that you can move in and out of. It has 8 Megs of memory to buffer the songs. You get songs onto the drives with those IDE hard drive pullout trays, just pull the hard drive out of the unit and push it into a PC with the receiver tray to transfer songs. Sound quality is very good, it will play up to a 256k MP3 and supports VBA. I believe it uses a dedicated MP3 decoder chip. It does random play of songs within a directory, filesystem, or entire drive. The software is upgradable via a 4Meg EProm, unfortunately you have to have a EProm writer to do the upgrade or order a new chip from Xeenon. The unit is intended to be mounted in your trunk, it is about the size of a small CD-Changer and has a non-wireless remote that includes the LCD display and buttons to navigate.

It is definately lacking some of the original Empegs features, but I already had a spare hard drive and nice head unit so I could not justify purchasing an original Empeg (not to mention I am number 10000 something or other on the list). Now with voice recognition and ethernet (and, please, mac software) they have me lusting after an Empeg Mark 2.

Anybody want to buy the Shuttle? I will probably end up ebaying it once my number finally comes up for the new Empegs. Maybe Empeg wants to take it in trade? Ya know, do a little research on competitors products? Maybe give me half off the first Mark2 of the assembly line in exchange :-)

-Mike