Okay, I've had my empeg for a little over a week now, and have been 150% pleased with it. The learning curve is not "too" steep, and even my friends now know how to get to music on it. But I have a few suggestions for possible ideas/improvements with the interface, to make it easier to use whilst driving:

1) A "last playlist menu" button on the controller. That is, I have my music seperated first by Genre, then by Artist, then by Album (I have 6-7 albums by one artist so I don't like having 7 copies of their name on one playlist). So basically, if I'm listening to the album "Pomme Fritz" by Orb, and I want to jump to a song on "Orblivion" by the same artist, I have to navigate the menus again to get back to this folder. It would be helpful to have a button I could push and have the empeg jump right back into the menu for "Pomme Fritz" (last played) and then I can use the "back" buttons to go up a level, then right to the new album. See what I'm saying?

2) A way to build playlists: that is, sometimes I want to listen to more than one song (and not a whole album), so I would like to be able to choose a second song (while the first is playing) and "queue" it up (like winamp, etc) to be played after the first song, and keep doing so to my heart's content.

3) Have pre-defined keys go to seperate playlist submenus. AFAIK, the 0-9 keys are not used while the menus are disabled and music is playing. It would be cool to be able to define the "1" key to jump RIGHT to my "Ska" folder for example, and "2" to jump right to my "Less Than Jake" folder (can you tell I listen to them quite a bit?) If I'm incorrect about the 0-9 keys not being used, don't flame me too hard. ;)

4) Album Track Number edit field in emptool(emplode). A lot of times I know a song by what # it is on an album, and not by the name. Would it be possible to either add a track number edit field in the property sheet for a song, or maybe even just display the position number in the current playlist (which would also correspond to the track number) when you turn the "Information" on for a song.

5) I know its been requested before, but I'd like to put my 2 cents in about the Volume control. Holding the button is fine, but it is soooo slooooow at times. For suggestions, see the "Dynamic Volume" thread in this forum.

I believe that is it with respect to the UI.. I had a question about the equalizers... is it just me or do these things not save when you power the unit down? I've hit the "save" option at the bottom of the menu, but it doesn't seem to save when I unplug the unit to move it inside... Is this a bug or am I just ignorant? :)

Also, is it possible to use visualization on the FM Tuner? That would be a *really* nice future feature, since the FM Tuner screen is kind of boring compared to that of the empeg when playing MP3s.. ;)

Well, I believe that's it for now.. Keep up the awesome work, guys.. I'm completely pleased with the empeg. Hope you're having fun at Comdex!

ClemsonJeep
(O|||||O)
S/N 00246 6GB Blue

...let me add in my 2 cents while we're at it.. wouldn't it make more since for the full-screen info screen to come up when you press the info button (cd/md changer) ? I find myself scrolling through all the visuals just to get to that one sometimes...

How about doing this instead:
a 3 position toggle switch that toggles between a visual, that visual w/ scrolling info, and the full-screen info screen...
-mark

a 3 position toggle switch that toggles between a visual, that visual w/ scrolling info, and the full-screen info screen


Yes, yes, yes. That sounds like an excellent idea.

__
Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

Even to go further than this, I was thinking about how you said you disliked having to scroll through all the visuals to get to one in particular.

I think it would be cool to be able to customize visualization lists. That is, I'm sure more and more visuals are going to be coming out for the empeg, especially when we are able to start developing our own add-ons, but as it is right now there are over 20 visuals and scrolling through them to get to a specific on is kind of annoying.

So basically, we can set up a list of our "favorite" visuals and scroll through them rather than all the 20 visuals in the empeg. Of course we'd still have the option to scroll through them all...

ClemsonJeep
(O|||||O)
S/N 00246 6GB Blue

This has been on the to-do list for a while - it will come. CD-MD-CH will switch between visual/track info/coming next displays.

Customised visual lists will happen at some point, but currently no promises when: we'll probably document the API and allow download of new visuals to the unit at that point too.

Hugo

...not sure how you're planning on getting third-party software packages on this thing, but it would be nice (for the consumer) to be able to just "choose from a list of plugins" from within emplode...
-mark