A while back there was discussion about a "grass roots" development project to write player software from scratch. Many people including myself thought the idea was crazy because we had such a close connection (via this BBS) to the developers that it was relatively easy to get new features included

Well, with the Empeg reaching EOL status, I would submit to the Empeg community that it's time for us to seriously consider the possibility of developing player software in an open-source arena. It's likely 2.0 and future point releases will address some of our immediate needs, but as has been stated in the other threads, there will be an as yet undetermined future date at which the player software will be "feature frozen" and unsupported.

The Wish List forum has hundreds of feature suggestions of varying degrees of usefulness, feasability, and broad user appeal. Many of them won't get implemented by EOL. I suspect Ogg Vorbis support won't make it in, for instance, and you can never have enough new visualizations. :)

An open source player project would certainly be ambitious, but we are geeks, aren't we? Empeg is the perfect geek platform, and when the player software freezes, I know there will be features that geeks want in there. Since the "real" player software isn't going to become open-sourced, a start from scratch may be a good idea.

So what does everyone think? I'm a decent Unix/C programmer and would definitely offer my skills to such an adventure if there were others on board, it would obviously have to be a team effort. Right now I'd just like to open the discussion of such a project, and see what people think.

-Tony
MkII #554