I just got done browsing through tfabris' excellent "What's cool..." thread here and as a brand-new Mk2 owner (queue number 720, but had to defer for financial reasons...) thought that a great "companion" thread would be about what sorts of tips'n'tricks those of you lucky enough to have had yours for a while have come up with? Things that aren't so obvious in the UI, a nice way of ordering playlists for easier retrieval, interesting software hacks, unusual installations or usage (a friend of mine insisted once that he was going to put his empeg in his airplane when he finally got it, but has since had to sell the plane) that sort of thing.

I actually started a thread some time ago but no one really took it up.

I imagine that once there are more thrid party developers on board (12 - 18 months?) we will see developments on this type of thing. Every so often a trick in operation pops up but i don't think there is enough complexity to give this much use just yet.

Prove me wrong!

Murray 06000047
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I actually started a thread some time ago but no one really took it up.

Y'know, you could do the same thing to that thread that I did to my "cool stuff" thread, and deliberately post something to it every now and then to keep it alive. That way, more folks would see it and might contribute. Yes, it's cheating, but it works.

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Tony Fabris

As to playlist organisation, I initially went for an "Albums" section which had everything, and then moved favourite songs around to other groups: "Techno", "Eighties", etc. This was fine, but I ended up pretty much duplicating the Albums in the genre sections because they were all my favourites (I'd selected them beforehand).

Then I changed this slightly so each genre had an Albums section which contained the actual albums in order, and then made classifications (e.g. "Happy", "Sad", "Fast") and copied things into them for moods and other non-genre, non-artist-specific categories. I don't find myself wanting to mix songs from the main genre classifications, so I don't want to wade through all the albums of another genre to find one thing I like. Besides, searching and appending makes that sort of impromptu "hey, I want to hear..." decision easier.

But as I've had to give that empeg back to its owner I can't say this is based on any more than a couple of weeks' experience.

Paul

P.S. empeg: when's the Wendy-Filter coming out? Presumably there'll be some discreet, non-obvious keycode to activate it (e.g. four quick presses of CD-MD CH).

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

Errr, I have to ask, what's a Wendy-Filter?

Correct me if I'm wrong guys, but is the Wendy Filter that thing that with a certain set of keystrokes you can "censor" out certain playlists and songs? You know, so people can't see all the NSync and Brittany Spears albums on Hugo's empeg (was that you, Hugo?). I believe it's named after an "associate" of one of the empeg staff, and was initially brought up as a use for the serial port.

Of course, I could be grossly incorrect :)

DiGNAN
13653

That's pretty much it, D.

As I understand it, we will get the ability to have multiple filters. I'm not completely clear how that works, but Hugo promises it will be very powerful, and it will have applications above and beyond just "hiding the embarrasing songs".

You know, so people can't see all the NSync and Brittany Spears albums on Hugo's empeg (was that you, Hugo?).

Yeah, I saw it with my own eyes. And I think I saw some Kylie Minogue in there, too, next to the Spice Girls.

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Tony Fabris

Oy! The only Kylie on there is the recent stuff (deconstruction signing onwards). And NSync has only just been put on there. And I have *two* eiffel 65 songs.

So I like pop music...

The wendy filter is scheduled for 1.1 release, but obviously no promises. The UI is a bit more complex than a few button presses as you can save preset filters, eg - no teen tracks, no swearing, no album tracks, whatever. Once enabled, the filtered tracks can't be accessed - they're removed from your current playlist and don't appear in any search or play options.

Hugo

i have a couple of debbie gibson songs on my empeg that i'm pretty embarrased about...hopefully it will make 1.1

jeremy

12 gig, green...

Interesting uses...

Recently, I've taken up Colonial dancing (yes, yes, you can laugh now... :-)) and the instructors have these rather large boxes which comprise tape-player, mic and aux inputs, controls and a large speaker. It's an all-in-one box - plug in power and go, basically; except for the huge collection of ten and twenty minute tapes that they have to lug around so that if someone asks for Emily's Progress or the Wherligig they have it right there.

Well, you can see where this is heading; especially now that someone's said that the empeg has the ability to mix the aux-in with what's currently playing.

There would only be two things to change. The minor thing would be a couple of extra play controls: play this song once and stop (i.e. you may want to play that song a couple of times) - although this could be managed by putting each song in its own playlist that adds an extra level to the heirarchy.

The major thing is that these units have a speed control. This acts as both a pitch changer, to tune the tape to an external piano or some other instrument; and as a speed control, for when you want to slow a dance down for beginners or speed it up to match different music to a required dance. Since I've seen plug-ins for WinAmp that can adjust speed and pitch independently, this would be even better than having one single control that changes both. It would have to be activated by a special menu command (i.e. and then take over the left and right controls or something), but that wouldn't be a problem.

I'm not really throwing this in as a wish list, but I think it'd be a cool install to do - make a portable box that acts as sub enclosure, amplifier and empeg holder all in one.

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

I think that would be a cool feature, but I definitely wouldn't want a new item in the root menu for it. It allready has alot of stuff in there, plus I don't think that's all too usefull for the majority of people. What I wouldn't mind is if all these filters and extra things had an item to themselves. I can live with maybe one more item on that list, but I leave it to empeg to figure it out.

But ideas like those are deffinite pluses for people like DJ's. This has to be a great DJ tool. They wouldn't have to carry around ANY CD's and there wouldn't be any extraneous songs either! Anyone going to use their empeg for that specific purpose?

DiGNAN
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