I've read the documentation on Emplode and creating playlists is indeed easy but tedious.

Actually, it's not tedious at all. There's a difference between reading about how it works and actually doing it. Trust me, it's a lot simpler and less tedious than you might think after just reading about it. Admittedly, my collection of music is only about 1/4 the size of yours, and your definition of tedium might be more strict than mine.

The toughest and most tedious part of organizing an MP3 collection is getting all the tag data right, and it sounds like you've already done that. Dragging and dropping the files isn't that big of a deal when you actually sit down to do it.

Support in Emplode for m3u playlists. This would allow me to export playlists from MusicMatch using its filtering functionality and quickly assign tracks en masse to Emplode playlists.

This is a good idea, and I agree that it would make it easier to transfer your playlists to the Empeg. However, there's a technological hurdle that would need to be overcome: The songs stored on the Empeg don't go by the Windows file names, whereas the M3U files use the Windows filenames. This would be fine on first-upload, but what if you want to add a new playlist without adding any new files? The Empeg doesn't remember the windows file locations (on purpose) and would have to dupe the songs a second time to add the new playlist. There would be ways to overcome this, but the coding wouldn't be trivial. I think that an emplode implementation of the WendyFilter (whenever they get 'round to it) would be a more elegant solution.

Support for playlist combinations on playback. I should be able to choose what combination of playlists I want the Empeg to randomly choose songs from on playback.

Well, you can already do this by nesting playlists in Emplode, just not "on-the-fly". Remember that this is intended to be a car player: complex filtering choices aren't something you're going to want to do while you're driving. "Sorry, officer. I was trying to combine Britney Spears tracks with East L.A. techno from 1993, and I didn't see the tanker full of gasoline."

I honestly thought as you did before I owned an Empeg: I thought I'd want all sorts of filtering options for the thing. But now that I'm actually using it on a daily basis, I end up just shuffling one of the same few playlists (one of which is the root "everything on the hard disk" playlist) or picking a specific album.

It's funny how some people can be satisfied with a 6-disk sequential CD changer, but when presented with the amazing option of what's essentially an unlimited-capacity CD changer, suddenly it's not feature-complete...

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Tony Fabris