I've been somewhat motivated recently to try and get the empeg back into my car, but it's not a huge priority since my commute to work is usually by foot these days. If I look longterm though, I see the appeal of having it back in there for roadtrips, and possible future work commutes.

The other side of my music is the Apple ecosystem I now live in fully. With iTunes Match coming up soon, I can easily access all of my music at home, work, and on the go off the iPhone without a big syncing mess.

The problem I find between these two plans though is AAC. I've gotten to the point that I just don't care enough to try and acquire new music via CD, then rip it to a good MP3 format and store the disc somewhere. The iTunes store offers a great way to grab new music quickly, and the genius suggestions are helping me broaden my collection a bit. I want new music, I don't want the hassle of being a librarian for my own collection.

So where does that leave me in regards to the empeg? With no native AAC playback, the empeg will either be stuck with my older collection, or I end up having it in the dash while my iPhone plays through the aux in. Without my entire collection on the empeg, the joys of down down down, then like/dislike just won't be there. And if the empeg is just going to be an aux-in device all the time, it's not much of an upgrade over my back to stock Mustang radio with aux-in.

I guess I'm throwing this out there to see what ideas others have. The idea of transcoding AAC to MP3 still bothers me enough, but maybe that is one route. I'm still thinking through how I plan to sync the empeg when it is returned to service, and may force myself to finally learn more Mac programming in the process. My ideal solution is one where my iTunes library sits in the center, syncing to the empeg somehow. mp3tofid may become part of the mix here somehow.

The other piece beyond syncing is the AAC part. I'd like to somehow retain the stock software, but maybe have hijack involved somehow into making the empeg think every AAC is just a WAV file, and it be fed a decoded WAV stream from the AAC files on disk. Not sure if there is enough CPU power to really do this though. I also doubt my programming skills are anywhere near good enough to pull this off myself.