I ordered and received my tuner a little while ago, and just took the time to install it last night. Here are my thoughts.

The total time involved was minimal, about 10 - 15 minutes in my case. The steps that took the most time were removing the docking sled and finding where in the hell my car antena cable went when the original head unit was removed. My sled has no clips bent, it fits very snug in my dash as is.. so I just needed to apply a little elbow grease to slowly ease it out and back in. My antena cable had dropped down my dash but I managed to snake a hand in there and locate it.

Hooking up the cables was very straight forward. I made sure to turn it on and try it all out before I slid the docking sled back in, no point in having to do it all twice! I have learned that lesson before.

Sound quality is great, as good as I expected. I have only one station in my area that supports RDS and its not my favorite by far so I wont get to play with that yet.

Programming the stations took a minute or two of head scratching.. my empeg version Kenwood remote doesn't seem to have this 'search' button on it that the documentation kept referring to. But there is a LOT of help on the riocar.org website here that got me through it. Now changing stations is a snap.

While I have been without a radio in my car for just over a year now (and I never missed it) it is nice to have one again. I probably will play with this new feature for a while just because its new to me. After an adjustment period I will probably go right back to my MP3 collection and only listen to the traffic reports and to my Dallas Stars hockey games if I am not already in front of my little 19 inch TV.

All in all I am pleased.

I had a few problems with my tuner:

• "Now & Next" info mode doesn't work
• Tweak Order doesn't work
• Mark Track doesn't work (I wanted to mark a load of stuff for re-tagging)
• None of the shuffle modes seem to work, except Random

So I've gone back to MP3s.

On the plus side, the compression seems much better (I didn't notice any change in my free disk space), and the passengers seem to prefer the tuner's playlists.

I think the tuner screens really need some work. I think that an equivalent paradigm needs to be present to "manage" the radio station lists. Here in the bay area there are some 50 stations in site (www.radio-locator.com). It would be great if the channels can be managed from emplode. I'd like to be able to group them by genre, scan them by genre or strength. What's more, I think there should be a separate "Call Sign" "Station Name" "Genre" and "comments" for each station just like the regular music. I'd even go one further, and want to be able to define time periods in emplode to mark out when particular regularly scheduled shows appear. So that when I tune in on a certain channel at a certain time, it will actually display what show it is. And visuals... where are the visuals? ;-)

Calvin

I dunno about you, but visuals work great for me on the tuner.

Hmm, are you using a Mk1? I seem to recall that you can't do visuals on the tuner in a Mk1...

If true, I must remember to add that to the FAQ.

Hmm.. that's odd. I'll try visuals again. It's a mark 2. Could be my sticky down button manifesting itself? Will try again on the way back from work.

Calvin

Don't tuner visuals only work with v2? I don't think they where there in 1.03.

-Mike

I would have to stand by Calvin on the visuals remark - I have a Mark II and have no visuals on my tuner as well. But, as mentioned above, I am running v1.03 and not v2.0b so that is probably what is going on.

I have tried to install the new software version but am having a problem getting it to even try to install.. I have reported my problem in the bug reports section of this BBS and look forward to getting it fixed.

In the meantime, no visuals for my tuner

I would also like to note that I spent some time yesterday searching each frequency in my area (Dallas Texas) for any station broadcasting in RDS - many web lists report that there are stations here that do but I did not find a single one, at least not yesterday. It was raining, maybe that was it..

I figured it.

In Tuner Mode, you can select visuals, and the name of the visual pops up...... and then it goes away and you're back at the strength meter again. (!!) you can even cycle through all the visuals and it will not come up. Then I figured it out. You have to turn Info Mode off... then visuals come up.

That's very unintuitive.... you can press the visuals button all day long in tuner and it just won't pop anything up.

Calvin

That's exactly the same as in MP3 mode: press 'info' untill, say, track info is displayed; keep pressing 'visual': you will see the name of the visual selected (if that display is enabled), but you have to change info mode to off, line or transient in order to actually see it.

As somebody here put it, it is helpful to imagine info screen laying over the visual screen, the later showing only in the former has a 'window' for it.

Hmm.. I did manage to get a graphic to display in FM mode, it is the regular empeg logo. I was unable to figure out how to change the visual to any of the others.

Hmm.. I did manage to get a graphic to display in FM mode, it is the regular empeg logo. I was unable to figure out how to change the visual to any of the others.


That's the only one in 1.03. If you want more, you'll have to use the beta.

I have upgraded to v2.0b and now have plenty to choose from.