Well I went out and saw a engineering samply of the new Ipod interface I was not impresses. (alpine is going to have a Better UI on there 05 head units they say) till then its little more then a CD changer with Names, each folder/playlist is like a disk and each song has a title minume search and tweak order but if you don't have an empeg it will work for mp3 playback.


But anyways I digress back to the subject at hand you think a 32M MK2a would handle wav files or would 48 or 64 be better?

Any good rippers that will put tags on wav files and will the Empeg play them and display the tags ?

Considering ether getting a EMpeg again and putting two 120 or so drives in it to hold all my music in wav format (no loss no artifacts) or getting a CarPC and a touch screen.

You can definitely get the empeg to display metadata on WAV files. However, the import tool emplode may not understand the tags on the files themselves. But you'll be able to edit the empeg's database manually via emplode to get the right info in there.

Also, the most recent alphas have support for FLAC, which may be better as far as space is concerned while retaining the losslessness. I don't know if emplode understands FLAC tags or not.

Trust me, you don't want to do wave files on the empeg. It's a nice novelty to have the ability to do it for certain files, but it's not something you want to have it do all the time.

Wave files means that the hard disks will be spun up constantly and will never spin down, increasing the heat and wear/tear on the hard disks. Wave files are also harder to manage and to up/download to/from the player. Also, certain features of the empeg probably won't work like gapless playback and such, because it's working so hard to try to keep the cache full.

And to answer your other question, wave files do not have a tag format like MP3s, so the only way to tag them is by editing their track information in Emplode by hand, after-the-fact.

And then, after all of that work, you won't be able to hear the difference between those wave files and a collection of well-made high bitrate MP3 files.

Finally, there's the capacity issue. If you only have a couple hundred CDs in your collection, then you might be able to fit all of it on the player, but only if you buy two of the biggest and most expensive disk drives. And then you won't have room for any more albums. And since the drives will run constantly, they'll burn themselves out pretty quick, thus requiring that you start the whole procedure over again from the beginning...

Just an FYI, 100gb is the largest 2.5" drive out now. Not sure if you were being hypothetical or not.

Hm. 64 megs would be enough to keep about one song in memory plus the software and the database. Maybe spinning up once every 4-5 minutes wouldn't be so bad. Assuming the player software managed the cache in that way.

Then again, I don't know how long it would take the empeg to fill the 64 meg cache reading from the disk. A minute? Longer?

Not a minute, but a noticeable time, especially if you have visuals running.

.wav files run about 6.5 times bigger than 192kbits/sec mp3s in my experience, so you'd need a cache 6.5 times as large to approximate the spin up frequency of 192kbits/s mp3s. Assuming that 12MB of a Mk2a is cache, then 82MB would be required. Of course, we know that a Mk2 runs happily with only 12MB total RAM, and indeed, a Mk1 only 8MB total RAM, so you should be able to beat their mp3 spin-up frequency with 64MB of RAM in a Mk2a playing .wavs.

But it's still not worth it IMO.