Right, put your money where your mouth is time.

How many of you would pay, up front, to have V3 A worked upon for six months to remove a selected subset of major bugs and get it to Beta condition?

If so, how much?

Which bugs do you want removed/what would you want working on?

I don't know how much at the moment, but I would be willing to pay. My biggest issue is v3 not resuming where I left off. Other than that, it seems to work reasonably well until you use the tuner and it reboots itself.

I'd put up $50. Unfortunately that's all my unemployed ass can afford at the moment, i know that's not much of anything. I haven't even used V3 yet... waiting for it to get stable.

I'd pay 50 bucks (US funds). Finally, a reason for me to be upset about the weak US dollar against the Euro!

I'm just looking for stability and all of the version 2.00 features. Some silly stuff like no "Right click" in emplode would be nice to have fixed too. I love Alpha 3, but am afraid to use it on my main player.

Maybe we could set up a fund were we Paypal (or similar) to a site or account and once it reaches X amount of money, Y amount of hours would be put into the project? That way, all of the work is paid for up front. It'd be like a fund raiser, where we'd all get to see how close we are. It would also allow some people who are more generous to be able to pay as much as they'd like.

Yeah, I'd pitch in 50 bucks, too.

For me, its main problem was that its playlists would get all messed up after a few synchs. And, there were memory problems and such. Hard to reproduce stuff.

Oh, and while weu're at it, can we please get an updated builder image that can handle any size disk? The current builder doesn't work with big disks.

I'll also contribute $50.

I don't use 3A, so I don't exactly know which bugs are the worst, but if the effort will bring it to good 2B level bugwise, I would be willing to part with at least 50€. Make it 100, if it makes any difference.

I've been waiting for a beta to try v3, and would also contribute $50.

I'd definitely be happy to part with 50-100 EUR to get a stable, tuner-supporting release.

Yeah, I'm in. Haven't tried 3A yet so I don't know which bugs are the worst, but getting the radio(RDS) to work a bit better would be nice. And the rest of the bugs people have experienced... Amount? Oh, I don't know, 100 dollars or euros, tentatively...

Stig

I would also pay 50$-100$ for a V3 Beta. Better RDS support would be fine (Like in 2.0 final)

I also haven't used v3a very much, but would be willing to pay $75-$150

It is going to take a lot of people to raise the cash for a person's time for six months though. That is about 1,000 hours of work.

Reading through the responses here, I don't think anyone has actually understood, apart frm yourself, what I meant. I get the impression that they are talking about paying for the final result , not the development time required.

To clarify here - I am talking about paying for the cost of an engineer to work for 6 x 4 x 40 hours to tackle correctional work for a limited list of bugs, for release of a free update to the player software.

Although I see that there is some limited interest here, it is not really sufficient to fund an effort of this scale. I think you all need to be pretty realistic here: THERE WILL BE NO MORE SOFTWARE UPDATES FOR THIS PRODUCT . That is the bottom line. Unless there is some serious money pulled together to do this, and a spec agreed for "one final push", then you will be stuck with tuner bugs, graphics bugs, and all the other bugs for the foreseeable future. The car player is not a living, supported product any more, and to think otherwise or hope that secretly, somewhere, someone is working on it is pure fantasy.

It's time to wake up and face facts, as unpleasant as they may sound. If you want to do anything to ensure the future of our beloved player, then now is the time. Start thinking about it!

Ok, I'd pony up $100. What is the estimate for a job like this to be done? Can a quote be made? Thanks.

Looks like we better start making the software our self...

Audun

No point in paying somebody to do a builder image -- that stuff is entirely 100% open source, and there's likely 20 people on this BBS (outside of Cambridge) who can do it, given a few hours.

Let's concentrate on the stuff we don't have source code for.

Cheers

Ahh, well.. if that were really the case (never again a s/w alpha for the player), then any money contributed here would really be MUCH better spent on an Open Source alternative. There are already a couple of those, and with six months full-time effort from virtually any competent Linux hacker, they'd get a lot better rather quickly.

Cheers

I don't think we'll be able to raise that much money. If we managed to get 100 people to pay 100 dollars each, that would be 10000 dollars. That would be about oh, two months work...? To expect to get much more than 100 people or expect them to pay a lot more than 100 dollars, would be, in my opinion, unrealistic... Unfortunately...

Stig

I agree. And on the other hand, $10K would be an incredible incentive for a skilled Linux person to hack away at an Open Source player -- doing a labour of love *and* getting some money for it is a powerful incentive.

Cheers

Greetings!

I have been mostly lurking or offline completely over the holidays. But this thread caught my attention. It sounds as if there have been some shifts in the way Rio looks (well, looked) at the empeg car customer base as a trial community for experimental features. I know that it has really been the folks @ empeg (current and former) that have been pushing this. Given that people have been moving on and away from Rio, I suspect that the management (term used in a very sarcastic manner) have lost site of the value of their own customer base and user community. Sad.

But if the code will not be developed any further, I doubt any amount that could be raised (and I am willing to kick in for this too) would be enough to even get Rio's attention to allow for use of the existing code tree, still under their control.

As for third party player work, that is always a possibility. The strength of the player has always been leading edge (for its time) hardware combined with extremely powerful software. I am not sure how easy it would be to replicate this, even with basic features, to give a stable application. I am not a coder, but I certainly would not mind trying to fund someone to find out...

While there are certainly some features I would like to see in a final (or even a stable beta) version, I have not loaded 3.0 because I prefer the rock solid stability of 2.01 over having to worry about / tinker with / avoid crashes while listening and driving. If I had a wish list of what I would like to see from 3.0 stable enough to have for a new release, I would say sync with emplode and crossfading would be my two highest priorities.

I guess this just turns out to be a long-winded "me too" message...

I would also be willing to stump up a little, but not enough I think.

Maybe we could look at this from another angle, how about giving Rio a big poke with a stick and suggest a few ideas for uses for the code and get the bugs fixed along the way, and make a community investment to show how serious we are.

The sort of thing I am talking about is the SqeezeBox or Roku SoundBridge. I am looking at these devices at the moment, but I am always dispointed with the bottom line. I really want my empeg to do all these things. There is a massive market for these things now (just look at the selection of products from big players like Linksys and Netgear etc...) and we all know that a similar player based on the empeg technology would blow allot of them out of the water. Imagine a slicker streamlined empeg with built in wireless and support for existing opensource server software (SlimServer!!!) there would be no server development to do, just design a snazzy box tweak the code and you have a ready to roll product with features like no other player on the market !!!

So where do I send my ideas to then ??? Anyone got a contact inside the "new" Rio I can bug ???

Cheers

Cris.

While I can't sling code, and I don't know what V.3 has to offer, I do love my empeg(s). If this gets enough momentum, I would personally comitt US$250, and maybe more through proxy. I deeply appreciate everyone who has provided their support thus far.

The reason why I started this thread came from a number of different facts:

- the current software, in various versions, has got a number of problems that ideally need development work to resolve.

- a number of attempts have been made/discussed here to stump up cash to do this, implying that some people at least would be prepared to pay for some development work.

- there is no budget for development work on this product, and no amount of money we can knock together here will interest DNNA to divert the resources needed to do this work (they are only interested in bulk production and current products).

- it is highly unlikely that any perceived cost of this work for a free upgrade to a tiny, diminishing userbase of an obsolete, unsupported device will be considered seriously if DNNA has to pay for it.

- the player software cannot be released to open source, but at the same time, the people who have access to it (legally) cannot work on it (this is an oversimplification, but a reasonable summary).

- the empeg team are likely to be highly busy doing their daily development work on flash players for the foreseeable future.

- I am under an NDA to what was SONICBlue, which may/may not still be in force now that the empeg team and the associated IP has been acquired by DNNA.

- I am unemployed, and likely to be so for the near future - but I still have bills to pay.

- I am a pretty experienced C++ programmer (the language of the player application), with the majority of my professional systems work based on many variants of UNIX (the target OS of the player unit - and no, don't nit pick till you have finished reading).

- I started out as an electronics engineer and transited over to embedded software development, so I should be competent enough to do this type of work.

- I cost a lot less than a staff member at DNNA (Rio division) per hour (ie., zero - read on), without diverting a staff member from his daily work.



Here's the proposal: due to my unusual circumstances (NDA, correct qualifications, available to do the work), I would be prepared to spend time on the player software. Since I am under an NDA, the IP of DNNA is protected and would not be released. Hence, I am in a reasonably favourable position to ask for permission to do this work externally to Rio with a suitable level of product confidentiality.

If permission was granted by DNNA to do this, and if the community here enters a contract with me to pay me a salary to live on for a period of time (say, 6 months) then I could survive whilst working on this as a professional project without any fiscal or practical consequence to Rio/DNNA. I have the facilities to carry out this work at home, without Rio/DNNA having to provide this at their cost.

So: you guys pay me, working as a "protected" and priviledged insider, to provide you with an updated version of the software, without any legal compromises or IP violation. I get a job and can eat, Rio basks in the reflected glory, everyone's happy.

Comments?

I *am* working on a nifty way to get all you DIN-loving empeg owners something bang up to date. Can't say any more than that at the moment, but fingers crossed there will be something for the next owners meet which will have you drooling

Hugo