OK, I've been playing some more and I have the following wishes to add to my list:

1 - I could really do with a 'Search by playlist' search. OK, so maybe I've organised my tracks in a funny way, but being able to search for "Good female vocal" or somesuch would be nice, rather than have to trawl through the entire playlist list to find it.

2 - I'd really really like to be able to sub-search. I'll give you an example of why. I was showing the Empeg off to a woman at work who said "OK, have you got any Bob Marley on there?" I said "Of course" (well, words to that effect), did a search by artist and there he was. Before I clicked 'DNPP', she asked to see the list of tracks so she could pick from that. The only way I could do it (unless I'm missing something here) was to play the playlist, put up 'Now and next' and then skip through them. Not ideal.

I'll give another example. I've got lots of Jean-Michel Jarre albums. Each album is a playlist within a parent 'JMJ' playlist. Now, I want to listen to a single track, but I can't remember what it's called, so I'd like to select 'JMJ' from the artist searchlist, then be able to scroll through all the tracks by that artist to select the one I want to listen to.

Now, I'm guessing that people are going to say that I should be able to remember track names. Please don't. The words and tune of a song I can cope with remembering, but like people's names and faces, I draw a blank with track and album names.

Another thought occurs to me here - This would actually be even more useful for virtual playlists - e.g. search by Genre. Without playing the playlist, how do I get a list of all the tracks I've got with an 'Acid Jazz' genre tag?

3 - When uploading a directory as a playlist, if a track filename has a track number (e.g. "01 - In the flesh.mp3"), then that track number should be used to place the track in the correct order in the playlist. Most of the directories I drag/dropped worked correctly, but a few put the tracks in an unaccountably strange order (note, I'm not dragging a list of tracks - I know about the Windows 'feature' in that respect. I'm talking about dragging a single directory which contains a stack of MP3s).

I think that's about it for now!

Nick.



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I could really do with a 'Search by playlist' search.

Interesting. This sounds like it would be fairly easy to implement, and have negligible impact on the current user interface. It would also take care of another problem that some users have asked about: The ability to append a playlist to the currently-playing one. If we had a "Search by playlist" feature, then we'd also automatically get an "Append by playlist" feature. I like it.


I'd really really like to be able to sub-search.

Although you're not the first person to ask for this, your Bob Marley example is a good one.


When uploading a directory as a playlist, if a track filename has a track number (e.g. "01 - In the flesh.mp3"), then that track number should be used to place the track in the correct order in the playlist.

The only difficult part about that is how does the Empeg know it's a track number and not part of the song title, e.g. "Mambo No. 9" or "2112"? (Ewww, now there's an odd combo.)

I guess it would have to parse all the filenames in the directory and see if it can find commonality in the digit positions and a sequential order. The coding is do-able, but not simple.

But wait, there's something better: There's a spec that allows you to add the track sequence number to both V2 and V1 tags. In V2, it's its own separate field, and in V1, it's the 30th character of the comment field. Many rippers (including AudioCatalyst, if I recall) write this field automatically. (In V1 tags, you often see it as a "black bar" at the end of the comment field.) If Emplode read this field and detected sequential tracks, then ordered them correctly on the initial drag-and-drop, it would be cool.

Oh, and regarding the "In the flesh" example: isn't it irritating that we can't have question marks in file names?

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Tony Fabris

Now, I'm guessing that people are going to say that I should be able to remember track names.

Actually, for me remembering song names is very hard. My favorite group has a lot of instrumental type music whos names mean nothing to the song. Growing up in the CD generation, I have gotten to know songs by track number.

Alex Lear

There *is* an easier way. Since the filename titles are only valid on first upload, you simply need a checkbox to "sort numerically" or something like that. That way one won't get collision between track-prepended and non-track prepended songs. Personally, my on-disk format is tNN-TrackTitle.mp3. I would appriciate this feature greatly.

Re your ID3 tags feature, that might become tricky, as what happens when they are included in other playlists? You could say that it's only valid in the primary playlist (don't know how easy that is to find out in their code), but things would get messy quickly.


Fly me to the moon...

Re your ID3 tags feature, that might become tricky, as what happens when they are included in other playlists?

As with numeric filename sorting, it would only be used the very first time you dragged and dropped your songs into emplode. It wouldn't apply to rearranging songs in emplode and adding new playlists.

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Tony Fabris

Good point, I guess I didn't think of that because the ID3 tag stays around, and the actual filename doesn't.

Fly me to the moon...