Hey,

You know - it seems that the same questions come up over and over again on this BBS; All valid questions that have been answered numerous times. The Tivo forum used to have their FAQ setup in a cool way; basically the faq was another board, with a list of the top faquable posts listed on it. A new user could click on that board, and see a list of most commonly asked questions/answers. I think this was a really good idea that'll work great for the empeg bbs.

The Tivo forums have since switched to a real faq, but I think their old format would actually work better for us, since this seems to be a much-more community-help-oriented bbs then they are. The board could be a list of common topics, and the moderators could just move the appropriate posts from the regular BBS over to it.

What do you guys think?
-mark

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

I think it sounds like a great idea. Someone was talking about writing a faq for the empeg a few months ago, but I havent heard anything about it since then. Tony has been great about answering questions that have been asked multiple times in the past. Thanks for your patience, Tony.

Sean

Thanks for your patience, Tony.

You're welcome.

I have to say, though, that I'd much rather see a really detailed FAQ on the main web site rather than a FAQ forum here. If we're going to put energy into a FAQ, why not make it official and permanent?

What's going on with that previous FAQ project?

___________
Tony Fabris

...My thinking is we can use the same approach that Tivo used... Their FAQ started out being forum based, and was eventualy moved to a real faq. I think the forum might be a great way to gather all the information and relevant posts in one spot - from that point it shouldnt' be too hard for someone to actually compile that information, because the data will all be there, organized in some fashion...
-mark

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

Any comments or suggestions on the new FAQ area?
-mark

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

Any comments or suggestions on the new FAQ area? Anyone wanna help dig-out old/useful information?:)
-mark

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

The two things I get asked most are:-
a) Where can I get one? followed by "WHEN?!?!?!?!"
b) Why can't it play CDs / CDRs / CF?

I guess that the second hand market and the imminent flood of Mk IIs helps 'a', and I don't know who's written the best answer to 'b', but I guess there's a good-un out there somewhere.

Good work, though!

there was one from rob (i think) that bisaclay said that space and "why would you need cd,s wehn you got MP3's"

Proud owner of #161

This is already in the official FAQ:

Q. Why didn't you put a CDROM drive in the empeg Car? I want to burn my own CDR's and use them in it.

A. We did consider this option, but decided against it for a number of reasons: some practical, some commercial, and some because of our own opinions. Starting with the practical ones:

1. There just isn't enough room. When things like power supplies and a decent display on the unit are taken into account, there is very little space left for a huge CD-ROM drive. Even laptop drives would fill all of the space currently filled with the hard drives.

2. Durability. Most CD-ROMs nowadays are made to be cheap, not durable, due to the ever shortening cycles of PC development and higher CD speeds. When you throw in the things like wear on bearings from spinning a CD in a moving, vibrating vehicle it becomes apparent that you really need a custom in-car CD-ROM mechanism, which aren't thick on the ground. Both these problems could be solved if we were a huge audio company, who has mechanisms and designs for these things which could be adapted for CD-ROM (as opposed to CD-audio) playback. But we're not - yet! Adding MP3 playback to a normal CD-audio player isn't as easy as putting a MP3 decoder into the output stream: CD-audio data (a) runs at the wrong data rate and (b) uses an error-spreading technique on the audio stream, as opposed to an error-correction, sector-based technique for CD-ROMs.

Next, the commercial reasons:

1. Limits the market to those with CD-recorders. You need a CD-recorder to use such a device. CD-recorders are expensive items, have a habit of being a pain for novices to get working reliably, and so on.

2. Appeals to music pirates. Although it appears that Diamond have emerged victorious over the RIAA, we're not being complacent, and we do not want to be seen as encouraging piracy. Whatever people say, the RIAA and other music industry organisations are rightly worried about CD-R owners, and associate them with piracy, which being honest is what most of the CD-R drives are used for, in one way or another.

Finally, our personal reasons:

1. Not big enough! The idea with the empeg is to have *all* your favourite music with you at all times. As the idea was go get rid of swapping tapes or CDs, it seems a backward step to end up swapping CDs, even if they hold 12x as much as they did before. The empeg can now have over 600 hours of CD-quality audio all inside the unit!

2. Breaks the database. On the empeg, the music is organised in a database. This allows you to specify tracks to be played by various categories and to bring together different moods of music with ease. With a handful of CD-Rs, you lose this 'anything, anytime' freedom that you get with a hard disk. It also doesn't lend itself well to maintenance of the database: for example, modifying the criteria on a tune stored on a CD-R (say, recategorising Ash from Britpop to Indie) is a major pain.

...You know, with the discussion between marcmerlin&dredd going on in a different thread, I thought it might be smart to ask if anyone had a problem with their posts being re-used in the faq. The faq is basically a copy of important messages in the original threads, and will be accessible from the BBS under the new faq section. (this section is currently hidden until we get some data on it, but will be publically accessible again shortly..)

I'm hoping that there aren't going to be any problems with my paraphrasing people the way I've been doing so there, and I hope that you'd write me a private message if there was a problem. It would be nearly impossible to write everyone ahead of time to ask their permission, as there's alot of people that I'm paraphrasing, often times an entire thread... As a curtousy, I'm always re-linking back to the original message as well..

-mark

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

I thought it might be smart to ask if anyone had a problem with their posts being re-used in the faq.

My 2.112 cents:

Copying portions of messages on the BBS from one forum to another shouldn't be a problem since the messages are still on the BBS. And although I don't think anyone would object (especially since they're given dure credit), anyone who does can easily have the offending portions edited out by the forum moderators.

Until the forum goes public and everyone else sees the forum's format, they're probably not going to understand or be able to form an opinion, but I'm pretty sure the reaction will be positive.

___________
Tony Fabris

I plan to update the official empeg FAQ from the forum. Sometimes I'll write new answers to the questions presented, but where an existing answer covers the issue I'd like to copy that text.

Does anyone have any objections?

I'll be happy to have a credits page in the FAQ, but I would warn you that empeg.com gets a lot of hits, and if you want your email address on the FAQ you could expect to get quite a bit of newbie mail.

Rob

_That's_ the one I was thinking of. A pointer to that from the BBS FAQ section would be handy.

Steve

good idea; thanks.. added now:)

In reply to:

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_That's_ the one I was thinking of. A pointer to that from the BBS FAQ section would be handy.

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...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

I noticed the 'canned' FAQ addressed the CD-R question. For CDs, I plan to hook my existing deck into the new player via the Line-In support. Although, it should be interesting changing CDs, as I'll have to move my deck down in front of the stick shift. Probably will only be able to change in 2nd and 4th.