The unit itself looks smart, sounds good (how good it is in a car I'll tell you next week) and has had all sorts of people oohing and ahhhing over it (Until I tell them the price, then they look at me like I'm mad).

I've got three complaints with the Empeg:

1 - About half of the visuals are naff. About a quarter of the remainder are clever, but I'll never use them. It really should be possible to block out the ones you don't like. It's a shame that even the potentially good (but rather unappealingly named) 'Toilet floor' is ruined by the occasional (once a second ish) black line/flicker across the screen. My preferred graphic - 'Infotex dist' has a bug which has been covered before.

2 - The Empeg forces its own structure on you. While under some circumstances this is not necessarily a bad thing, it does make it very difficult to find songs. As I've said, I'm not blessed with a wonderful memory and actually finding the album/song I want to listen to is not easy. This is for two reasons, both of which I've already mentioned in previous posts. a) The lack of a subsearch facility (i.e. the ability to search within the result set of a previous search), and b) the lack of the ability to search on playlist. By way of example, I have five Pink Floyd albums. I can never remember what two of them are called (just checked and they're 'Relics' and 'The division bell'). At the moment, if I want to play them, I have to search on artist 'Pink Floyd' and play the whole of the result (all 87 or so tracks). I then put the display into Info:Track and then skip forward until I see the album name I want, then start a new search by source for that album. It should not be that hard.

3 - The Genre/database bug. Now, I sent an e-mail to the guys at Empeg and posted the bug here. I've not had a reply from Empeg (not even a confirmation of receipt). Basically, search by genre doesn't work because my Empeg thinks I've got tracks with all sorts of Genres in them, when I haven't.

All in all though, when the above points have been cleared it'll be a product worth having. To be honest, after demoing it to people, I've had a hard time justifying to them why I've spent so much money. The Genre bug and lack of sub-search both made people say words to the effect of "Why did you spend so much money on a badly made piece of junk like that".

Based purely on the Empeg itself, I'd argue to its detractors that it was money well spent. However...

Emplode.

I'm not impressed.

Not at all.

It's non-intuitative, clumsy and lacks several of the functions which I would have thought would have been vital - for starters, it should be able to emulate the Empeg's creation of virtual playlists. At the moment I can see no way to get Emplode to show the Artist/title/genre virtual playlists, except saving the CSV and then loading that into a database for analysis.

Add to that the fact that even the simplest change (e.g. changing the name of a playlist) results in a four minute 'rebuilding music database' wait upon synchronisation. Sometimes you can add another couple of minutes while the unit downloads the database too. All this over ethernet.

Add to that the fact that deletion of some playlists actually deletes the tracks within the playlists and the deletion of others doesn't - it just moves them into 'Unattached items' (NB the songs only appeared in _one_ playlist). There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this. Of course, the need for two syncs (one after the deletion of the original playlist, and another after the deletion of the tracks which have been moved into Unattached items) wouldn't be so bad if the syncs didn't take so long.

Add to that the fact that some updates in emplode don't register as needing to update the Empeg (sometimes I've found this with changing the playlist order and/or adding new tracks. Again, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to this).

Add to that numerous small niggles about what it says and what it doesn't say under various conditions and lots of other things.

All in all, I'm happy with the player itself and I'm totally gobsmacked (in a good way) by the level of support from the Empeg guys on this BB. However, I'm not at all happy with the user interfaces built on top of the hardware. As things stand, I couldn't recommend the Empeg to anybody other than a born-again gadget freak, and even then it would be with several caveats.

I pondered long and hard over how to phrase this post, or even post it at all - I figure there are zealots here who'll rip me to shreds. However, not everybody who buys an Empeg will be a zealot, and I rather suspect I'm not going to be the only person saying this sort of thing.

Nick.


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