Personally, I can see a benefit in having an online place to talk. From searching the posts here, there have previously been a few attempts at setting up an IRC channel to support empeg but AFAICS they died a death, a semi-official channel looks good to me.

Actually, what about multiple channels, e.g. #empeg-support, #empeg-chat and so on? Obviously it depends on how things pan out but often on IRC ppl want somewhere to hang-out without seeing continual "How do I ....." type questions.

While I'm here, I'd just like to say I'm still "sat on the fence" about sharing empeg files. While it would be good to share superior bit-rate rips of CDs with other empeg users, if it turned into (another) publicly available source of .mp3's we would possibly have another Napster and all the problems that go with it?
Rue