Collective nostalgia?

Noticing more actual empeg activity these days, is this all a case of collective nostalgia? I'm even feeling it a bit, tempted to install my empeg back into the car after my disastrous CarPC experiment.

Anyone know a good car audio shop in Southern California? Willing to drive a bit to let pros handle it, since my car still has some quirks with the audio setup post CarPC.

New Age Audio on Commonwealth in Fullerton is / was pretty good. At least they knew what an empeg was "back in the day".

I'm still using my Empeg but I find myself increasingly to lazy to sync to it. Why can't it have automatic MP3 searching so it just finds new MP3's on a network share and syncs them automatically? What can I say new technology has made me lazy.

Fired up mine and tinkered with it a bit today. Forgot how many various things I had installed on it over time, and was glad to see the two 30GB drives have held up this long.

Used jemplode to update hijack from 477 to 513. I no longer have my linux server that would autodetect an empeg on the network and update hijack automatically. I'm guessing 477 was on there from back when I used the empeg on my desk for music, as it seems too new to be from 5 years ago.

Tried to change the name of the player, and jemplode was throwing an error that fsck couldn't run. Forgot I added mt-daapd to autostart, and with it running, a sync couldn't complete. This, only after discovering my USB->Serial adaptor has no functional drivers for any modern OS. (Last official ones supported Windows 2000, and Mac OS 9. The Linux ones are badly broken, never mapping to a /dev/tty device).

Rooted around my drives via the hijack web interface, and found my old distributed.net stuff, along with various old web interfaces that don't work well in modern browsers. empire install from way back, along with the gps 0.17 version. Oh, and the all important ttsclock is still running every boot, with StrongBad telling me the time.

It's all coming back now. Trying to remember why I even went with the CarPC route 5 years ago, instead of just installing the empeg in the car. At least it sat patently waiting, tucked inside the mlord dock.

when i find a suitable wifi bridge to hang in my car, i'm going to do that. it's got a 320gb drive. it's just going to sync my entire iTunes share, which now nightly gets mp3tofid run over it.

In my case, my online stream isn't (anymore), so, it was time to use more than the aux in again!

Ahh mp3tofid- there's something I need to look into. I decided this morning I'm going to start over. Get rid of all my old music that I don't listen to anymore and copy a whole new library over. mp3tofid looks like a good way to do this quickly.

mp3tofid is pretty much indispensable for me.

i put it in github, ported it to macos, and added a patch to make it spit out jemplode csv and xml files, fwiw.

As we all know we recently lost one of our members, Godfrey. His wife Christine has been kind enough to give me Godfrey's empeg!!! A great honour indeed.

So for the first time in quite a while I have an empeg on my desk!!! I am actually really enjoying Godfrey's playlist, and am still blown away by how good this little box of tricks sounds. The fact it fired up first time, and I could find it in jemplode first go is quite amazing. I am currently taking a backup of his playlist/mp3s.

I think its back on the desk for good, and I'm off to dig out my own...

Cheers

Cris

I think it has to do with the Empeg Meet. It's just not right to care about these meets and not about the player itself. Even though I did not attend.

Pim

Since I was naive enought to uninstall it from my car, my main empeg has been sitting on my desk in its dock, connected to my stereo, ready to play anytime. But, the truth is, I've been afraid to turn it on for quite a while, now, and be reminded of the many appreciated features I am missing with silly "modern" players around the house. Squeezebox being the only good one which I use all the time, still the Empeg is by far the best around.

Yes, I too think that if only the player could detect new music in my collection and sync automatically, that would be quite an incentive to put it back in my car.

i'm working on that, but without either wifi in the car or you empeg coming inside, it wouldn;t work for you.

Empeg detecting new music in my collection via ethernet? I would not ask for more, and would most likely go back and install it in my car.

Just dug my Empeg out of the cupboard, and was pleased that it just booted up and ran fine.

Last time I used it was the 8th July 2008.

It still beats the pants off any other in-car MP3 solution I've tried. It won't fit easily in my current car, due to the custom dash layout of the factory fit stuff.

It's now found a permanent place on my desk, serving up tunes, just like it always used to. Can't think why I ever stopped using it.

I too have recently dug out my empeg. I installed it in my current Jeep back in 2004, then for some reason I can not recall, removed it about 2008 or 09. I think I too am going to start over - I have the perfect little wireless bridge, and have already tested that it will work at least at my home. Now just a few little details to work out.

I hope to find either a spare unit or VFD fairly cheaply as well, since mine is partially shot. I seem to recall the rotary encoder was also on the way out, so time to look at that also.

On the plus side, Seagate EE25.1 rugged drives are a little easier to find cheaply, so I have a pair. These work well down to at least 0F, which around here is a requirement in the winter (I know, I should bring it in... But I dont).

My empeg has been sitting in its Pelican case for about a year and a half. Since mid 2009, I've been listening almost entirely to podcasts, and since mid 2010, my cell phone (Palm Pre!) has been (automatically) downloading and playing them for me.

I began upgrading the stereos in my cars to replace the no-frills Alpine decks with the awesome JVC KD-R810 to get A2DP bluetooth streaming from my phone. While the Benz has both the JVC and empeg installed, the Volvo has neither (yet...), leaving me to listen to my phone through a single headphone. Weak.

I often want to finish the installs and bring the empeg back into service. While I use my phone for time-sensitive podcasts, my empeg receives the more immortal ones (like Car Talk). There's so much good content on it that I want to hear. Oh yeah, and music too...

I'm glad to see the empeg community is still around. As someone's signature once said, "I'll get around to installing an empeg in one of my cars one of these days..." Take care.

Me too I just listen to podcasts now and it's not really worth installing the empeg just for that.

So, any news on this awesome idea?

Well after all these years I Empeg about every day. I have one in the garage, my Jeep and my wife’s car. If I come across another one cheap someday I’ll have one in the barn as well.

I sure like the one press artist enque. I really don’t know why that isn’t a standard feature on newer players or Android apps.

Today, Christmas, is the day the Empeg comes inside and we listen to the Christmas play list all day.

Merry Empeg’ing

I took mine out a few months ago to see if they still work. Sadly, two won't boot, and the other boots but seems to have dead drives.

I haven't had any installed in a car since 2006, so I haven't bothered to get them fixed. I'd like to get them all fixed and get one in my car, though. I've really been missing it.

Sadly my empeg will be removed from the dash of my 2000 CR-V in the next little while. I am replacing it with a Pioneer double din unit that does what I want in terms of video and navigation.

It will be a sad day, but it really hasn't been used for a couple of years even though it's been sitting in the dash.

I also have another empeg sitting in a nice dock I built for it at home. It hasn't been turned on since we moved into our current house... four years ago.

I think I have three metal cages for the empegs, a home dock, built around a metal cage (might be one of the three), a bunch of different colored lenses and misc parts, including two winter proof hard drive supplied by the empeg folk around the time I stopped tinkering with the empeg.

If anybody is interested in the gear let me know. I may keep an empeg as a nostalgia piece, but the rest will be sold. Time to move on...

I have been using the Empeg nearly daily for longer than I can remember. Love the thing still after all this time. I am honestly surprised at how well the thing has held up over the years. Occasionally I have had to open it up mess with the HDD cable, but so far thats it.

I have thought about alternate music strategies like feeding my music via my phone, but still the thought of having EVERY thing I own (nearly) at my finger tips keeps it in my car. Even if syncing every quarter or so is a bit of a bear.