Let's face it -- Genres STINK for classifying music, and especially for the Empeg. "Rock" applies to thousands of songs in my collection, sub-genres of Rock like "Heavy Metal" and "Alternative" have so many gray areas that it's impractical to use genres to get the kind of songs you want to hear at any given time.

Furthermore, searching for specific artists/titles throws away the whole idea of using shuffle play and getting "surprise" songs that you want to hear, but just aren't thinking of at that moment. That's the magic of having an Empeg!

So... Using keywords or metadata, and searching through them with the Empeg, has been discussed in the past, and I dont think the idea has gotten as much attention as it should. It could be such a great way to focus your Empeg's "rotation" to exactly what you want to hear at that time, just by keying in a few keywords.

Basically the idea I have in my head (and that has been hinted at before) is this:

1. On your PC, you add short descriptive keywords to your MP3's, which would probably be stored in the ID3 tag.

2. You Emplode them, and those keywords are associated with each song in the Empeg database.

3. You call up one of the player's Search screens and start typing in a keyword. I could see maybe 100 keywords for my collection, so fuzzy matching would probably require only 2-3 keypresses.

4. Hit a button to add that keyword to a "search phrase" of sorts.

5. Repeat process to expand or restrict your search. The whole time, the number of matching tunes could be displayed in the corner. You could allow "AND" or "OR" to make it even more powerful, but to avoid odd things happening with 3 or more search terms, it'd probably have to be limited to ANDing or ORing the whole keyword phrase.

6. Hit a button which "executes your search" so to speak, playing the songs that match the keywords.

Right now, you have to construct "canned" playlists in Emplode which anticipate a set of songs you think you might want to hear in the future. When you dump some more tunes on, you have to maintain these playlists. Isn't it easier to just add some attributes to those files, and then filter on those attributes? Keywords could describe an attribute of the instrumentation (heavy, loud, symphonic, accoustic), the tempo (fast, slow), the artist (female, group), or anything else about the song. You could even use genre names, or your favorite artists as keywords if it suits you.

I'd like to hear comments on this idea. I think this would be so flexible, and after thinking about some of the possible pitfalls, I still think it can be done and made usable.

-Tony
MkII #554