This one does come up quite often, but it's certainly not the case that 90% of people want a CD based player - especially after they've heard our reasoning against that.

Here goes with the standard response (something similar is in the FAQ):

We have no plans to integrate a CD player into our empeg Car product.

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. With the forthcoming release of the new Toshiba 18Gb laptop drive, the empeg will soon have up to 614 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.

I hope you can see our reasoning, even if you don't agree!

Regards

Rob