Guys,

Well done to you all for runnig such a great BBS. Anyway grovelling over !

Which version of the software is the MK2 currently being shipped with ?

If it is 1.1 does it hav ethe WMA support. Cos i jsut checks MP3 / WMA side by side and there are very significant improvements for the same given HD space and potentially the ability to put even more songs on the Empeg.

Having nearly justified to myself the cost of the machine, these answers are of interest. In fact i'm finding it difficult not to justify. Its just the cost of improving the car stereo to a level i am happy with that my bankrupt me. Estimated expenditure for the lot is £3k. (or a month in Austalia on holiday) which one gets the vote ..... hmmm

Anyway keep up the good work all posters and all at Empeg !

DH

The current version of Empeg software is 1.01 - as per the downloads section of the http://www.empeg.com website.

The 1.1 software hasn't been released to the alpha team yet (AFAIK), but it should be available "real soon now".

HTH

Paul.

Paul Haigh, Reg. 4120
(mk1) 6GB, Blue, 00254
(mk2) 12GB, Red, 00357

And the WMA Support, is this offical yet ...

I think i'm gonna wait for when they start shipping with 1.1 ... has there been a realease darte confirmed ?

Cheers

The only delay with WMA at the moment is paperwork, but we expect this to speed up now, with the influence of SONICblue behind us :) From a technical perspective, we have had WMA support in-house for a number of months.

Rob

Well done to you all for runnig such a great BBS.

Keep in mind that the Empeg guys don't run the BBS, they just participate. See this entry in the FAQ.

If it is 1.1 does it hav ethe WMA support. Cos i jsut checks MP3 / WMA side by side and there are very significant improvements for the same given HD space and potentially the ability to put even more songs on the Empeg.

As was already pointed out elsewhere on this thread: No, 1.1 is not out yet, but it will be very soon. Yes, 1.1 will have the WMA support in it for sure.

But don't let that stop you from buying one now. The software upgrades are very easy, and it's very easy to add/remove music from the player if you decide to change encoder formats.

Also, even though "on paper" the WMA format might look a little better, the MP3 format has the advantage of wider software support. There are more utilities out there for ripping, encoding, editing, and tagging MP3s than there ever will be for WMA.

And the differences between WMA files and MP3 files are very subtle. A properly encoded MP3 sounds great anyway. And if disk space is what you're worried about, well, the Empeg already has more capacity than any other MP3 player on the market.

___________
Tony Fabris

The claim that WMA at 64K sounds as good as MP3 at 128K has been widely discredited, however it is generally acknowledged that low bitrate WMA sounds a lot better than low bitrate MP3. Whether high bitrate WMA sounds any better than the same rate MP3 is an entirely different matter.

Personally, I'm considering using WMA for comedy shows and that kind of thing - I can use high compression and still get reasonable quality. Also, it is likely that a lot of music will be sold online in WMA format and so support for it will prove very useful then.

Rob