Here are the top 3 things on my wishlist regarding the player software. I know at least the first two have been requested before but I thought I'd bring them up again anyway

1. Show playlists in play order rather than alphabetical order. There are lots of reasons one might want to do this:

- arrange albums chronologically
- arrange artists alphabetically by last name
- put playlists that are accessed often closer to the beginning/end of the list where they can be reached faster by pressing the left/right buttons.

I know about the alphabetic shortcuts, however I often prefer to use the buttons on the player rather than hunt for the remote.

People have said that non-alphabetic order of playlists will break alphabetic shortcuts. It doesn't have to - here is how they can work. When you press '2' on the remote you jump to the first playlist that starts with A or B or C. Pressing it again goes to the next playlist that starts with A or B or C. If there are no more such playlists it goes back to the first one. In fact, this would work better than the current system even with alphabetical order of playlists - you can always go to the one you want by pressing a single button several times. Currently, if you have two playlists starting with A you have to press '2' to go to the first one, then >> to go to the second one.

2. A way to go back to the playlist currently playing without having to navigate the entire tree from the root. This is useful when:

- you just finished listening to a Doors album and really feel like listening to another one;
- you selected a playlist by mistake - usually you can press Up/* to go back up, except if you selected a triangle or a tune.

3. A more reasonable handling of long playlist/tune names when navigating playlists. Currently, the middle of a playlist name is displayed when it doesn't fit on the screen. A better option would be to display the beginning of the name and chop off the end. Ideally, the long name will slowly scroll left and right while it's selected.

Yeah, yeah, Tony, I know you told me so, but I still want my long names.

Best,
Borislav

ps. the empeg rocks

2. A way to go back to the playlist currently playing without having to navigate the entire tree from the root.:

Yes, please!

tanstaafl.



"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

not entirely sure, but i think this is coming out in 1.1. hugo mentioned something about a bookmark feature that would let you bookmark your position so that if you explore some musical tangent, you can come back to the playlist you were on before. again, not sure if this is what you were getting at, but it sounds like the answer to your wish.

jeremy

12 gig, green...

What about a counter that would give you an idea of the most played tuns. It would help you make up playlists.....

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MK II, (Blue but should be Amber) SN: 118

Players have been collecting this data for several months. In release 1.1 we're going to start using it (scarey huh?)

Rob

Unfortunately there have been format changes since the data started being collected: we didn't bother making it import old data as we couldn't guarantee its accuracy & it was only usage stats... so everything will start with zero on the 1.1 release.

Hugo

*mumble* i'm never told these things *mutter*

Can anyone smell a third party project...

Hmm, sounds like big brother to me.... You monitor what we all listen to, and invest in the most popular artists... ;)

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MK II, (Blue but should be Amber) SN: 118

Show playlists in play order rather than alphabetical order. There are lots of reasons one might want to do this:

Yep! This would be fine. Even better would be to make it configurable via emplode if the playlist should be alphabetical or in playlist-order.

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

Hmm.. and then having a function to play the least played songs...

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

...already implemented... ;)

Hugo

THAT is fast

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

Even better would be to make it configurable via emplode if the playlist should be alphabetical or in playlist-order.

Yes, that's how I see it too. A checkbox in the Properties/Playlist tab, part of the options tag as seen from emptool.

What do people think about the proposed change in behavour of the alphabetical shortcuts?

Borislav

not entirely sure, but i think this is coming out in 1.1. hugo mentioned something about a bookmark feature that would let you bookmark your position so that if you explore some musical tangent, you can come back to the playlist you were on before. again, not sure if this is what you were getting at, but it sounds like the answer to your wish.

Bookmarks sound like a different thing. From the posted descriptions I imagine them to work like this: while you are playing music you (somehow) remember the current playlist (whether it's a shuffle, search result or a static one) and your current position. At a later time you can continue playing the stored playlist from the stored position.

What I'm asking for only involves the static hierarchical playlists. Suppose I traverse them like this:

Sound Playlists Shuffle
        \/
        \/
   Soul |> Alternative Blues Child Flamenco
                                     \/
                                     \/
                                     |> Gipsy Kings  Paco de Lucia
                                     \/
                                     \/ 

When I was in the Flamenco playlist (the yellow one) my finger slipped and I selected the triangle when I really wanted to select Paco de Lucia. Too bad, now I'm in play mode and I can't easily go back. I can either keep skipping to the next track until I go through all of the Gipsy Kings tracks or I can go back to the root of the hierarchical menus and navigate through them again. What I would like to be able to do is basically go back to the yellow playlist with a single button press, exactly where I was before I started playing it.

Hope that's clearer... By the way, the down button on the player and pushing the rotary control always seem to do the same thing. Is that a physical limitation? If not, can we have a push on the rotary control go to the last position in the hierarchical menus (may not even be in a playlist - say Sound/Equiliser)?

Borislav

Borislav, you're not the only one to suggest this. Being able to enter the playlist structure at the current level rather than the top level has been requested before.

However, looking at the example you just posted makes me think... It seems to me that anyone requesting this feature is simply making their playlists too complicated. If you've reached the point where traversing the tree becomes a chore, then maybe you've simply made too many sub-trees?

My playlists don't go any farther than two levels deep (Artist/Album). I don't create "genre" playlists because I don't need to. If I wanted all of a given genre, I'd just do a search on genre, I don't need a playlist to do that for me.

In your example, you've got things broken up into genres, artists, then albums. Why does it need to be that complicated? Do you really find yourself hitting the "play" button on those intermediate trees, or do you always go fishing for a particular album?

Another possibility would be to create an "- Albums -" tree right in the root that has links to the album playlists. Then you could use that to fish for albums more easily if you wanted to.

___________
Tony Fabris

For what it's worth, here's a rough sketch of my playlist structure; I'm curious how others are tackling this...

Genre, artist, AND album name:
_Artist _Album, Eighties, rock, punk, hip-hop, Techno, Pop, Misc

_artist has every artist (that I have at least a cd from) and their work under it

_album is every album in a flat structure

other fields also have contain flat catagories, then other catagories as necessary:
i.e. - Techno
_mixed_by _album "Ministry of sounds" "Tranceport" "Rennaissance"

mixed_by is two levels deep, containing artist name, followed by his cd's under it...
_album is only one level deep, containing every album that's techno related

Other catagories can get long; for instance, rennaissance has 4 sub-catagories, with another 3 cd's in each subcatagories...

This system kinda works for me; I can get to an album fast if I need to by using the _artist _album, etc, but I can browse for something specific by using one of the other catagories... That way, if I know the name of a cd, I can quickly pull it up; but if I just remember that it's part of a subcatagory, I can browse for it...

...Of course, the search enhancements in Empeg 1.65 (thanks for the advance pre-copy btw, Empeg - but I couldn't get the guntella client to work from my apple airport??? it would download the first 30 seconds or so and then drop...) make this structure rather unnecessary now...
-mark

MK2: 36gb
Tivo: 90gb
CPU: 120gb
...I think drive manufacturers love me!

Borislav, you're not the only one to suggest this. Being able to enter the playlist structure at the current level rather than the top level has been requested before.

I know, but I haven't seen a yes/no/buy us beer first reply from empeg (might have missed it) so I thought I'd bring it up again.

In your example, you've got things broken up into genres, artists, then albums. Why does it need to be that complicated?

It reflects the way I usually select music to play. I always play an entire album in order, no shuffles or random songs. I rarely know exactly what album I want to hear next, just the type of music (i.e. genre). Then I need to look at the artists in that genre to decide which one sounds appealing. Once I've narrowed it down to an artist, I need to look through the albums. Only when I see the name of the actual album I go "oh yeah, that's the one I want". So a genre/artist/album hierarchy is the most natural for me. I do the same with my physical CDs, btw.

Of course the tree isn't exactly balanced. If I want a pop album, then it's a no-brainer - I only have a single one of those. Now heavy metal is a different story at 34 albums.

Another way to look at this is that you have to make a compromise between depth and width of your tree. If I put all the artists in a single playlist then it'll be 42 items long and a real pain to navigate (from the player).

Do you really find yourself hitting the "play" button on those intermediate trees

Well, no, that was just a hypothetical example, but I often want to select another album from the same list as the one I just finished listening to (and not necessarily the next one). Different scenario, same feature.

Borislav

Heh, and Tony was saying that plain genre/album/artist is too complicated. But really, organizing hundreds of hours of music isn't an easy task and it's quite normal that everybody will have different ways of tackling it.

the search enhancements in Empeg 1.65 (thanks for the advance pre-copy btw, Empeg

The rest of the world is eagerly expecting 1.01 and then 1.1, meanwhile empeg is working on 1.65? Something fishy is going on here

Borislav

I can't think of why I'd want to see a playlist in an order other than it's going to play. Perhaps sorting the playlist into alpha order, but that would then become the new play-order. Why do you want to see a playlist one way when when it's not going to play like that?


--The Amigo

Well, my top 3 wishes are still my top 3 wishes but this time I have a fourth:

4. Append playlist/song from them hierarchical menus. I don't like using the remote much, so I miss out on the search functionality (that's OK, I prefer browsing the playlist tree to select music) and the append mode (that's not OK). It's terrible, really, I'm sitting at a red light and near the end of the current playlist. I have the choice of selecting a new one now and cutting the last song short or waiting for the next red light with only the engine to listen to for most of the way (and that's less exciting than most, it's only a Volvo 740).

Here is how the interface can work: the bottom button enters or (if at the triangle) selects a playlist, pressing the knob appends it after the current one. If insert functionality comes along, pressing the knob can bring up a short menu with append (default), insert, or play options. True, that would be mk2 only but I can't come up with anything reasonable for the mk1 (except maybe holding the bottom button to append but that's a bit iffy).

As for my previous three wishes, the empeg guys have given no indication of how they feel about them even though the first one has been discussed to death and the second one has been requested many times. But I can hope that these are some of the surprise features in 1.1.

Wishes,
Borislav

A way to go back to the playlist currently playing without having to navigate the entire tree from the root

I know a really good way to do that, too... although it would cause a (solvable) problem with the Mark I players.

Instead of having the top button be "Pause" during playback, make the top button act like it does when you are navigating playlists: go up one level in the hierarchy.

Use the push-button aspect of the rotary knob to go into "Pause" mode.

This would not only add uniformity to the UI, but would be a very logical mode of operation.

The Mark I problem could be solved by giving a setup option to make the top button be a Pause button or a "Climb the hierarchy" button at the user's choice.

Now if the guys@empeg would only move the Track#/Duration information from the bottom line of the display to the top line of the display... I'd be able to read the first word of my song title.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

Instead of having the top button be "Pause" during playback, make the top button act like it does when you are navigating playlists: go up one level in the hierarchy.

Use the push-button aspect of the rotary knob to go into "Pause" mode.

This would not only add uniformity to the UI, but would be a very logical mode of operation.

Sounds good, except Rob has said that the intended functionality of the knob is to cycle through options in the sound menu.

Now if the guys@empeg would only move the Track#/Duration information from the bottom line of the display to the top line of the display... I'd be able to read the first word of my song title.

I thought for a while about doing this as a kernel hack, i.e. detect when you are using the track info mode and shift the bottom so many display lines to the top of the screen. The problem is that this won't work very well with browsing the menus or changing the volume (since they overlay the normal screen).

Borislav

What if there was an item, like a music track, that could be inserted into a playlist, one that is normally ignored by the player, but if specifically executed, causes a jump back?

-- Glenn

What if there was an item, like a music track, that could be inserted into a playlist, one that is normally ignored by the player, but if specifically executed, causes a jump back?

A bit of a hack and it'd be at least 4 clicks away but still much better than not having this feature...

Borislav

I've ben searching the BBS for more on this, but it looks like the last mention was back in 2000.

I would really like to see this #4 - append playlist feature. Any news or info on this?

Navigate to the playlist or track you want, then press and hold the button button. You'll get a menu with Insert, Append, Enqeue or Replace.

I forget when this was introduced - just go for the latest Beta.

Rob

but it looks like the last mention was back in 2000.

Well, back in 2000, and in the FAQ here.

Note that there is also a "search by playlist" screen in the searches, and you can append from there, too.

Wow, as soon as I read your response - I ran out to my car (while the co-workers weren't looking) to try it out. It works great and now I've got a big smile on my face making my coworkers wonder . It's great to constantly find new aspects of this thing to love. Thanks!

You're welcome!

Rob