What's with all the negative karma here?

Nice pun.

In my opinion (and I stayed out of this thread initially because of this), Adam originally brought the negativity with his comments that suggested the empeg guys were patting themselves on the back for having FLAC, Ogg, etc. support. I think I understand what he was trying to say, but he should probably have found a better way to say it. When such a comment is made in the thread announcing the 1.0 release of your 3rd party music player, it's bound to leave a bad taste.

Getting back to Squash, I actually played with a couple of the prereleases, and found it to be a very novel approach. I think automatic learning of listening patterns is the future of music players, and the algorithms used by Squash are certainly going to do a better job of picking your favorite tunes than a purely random shuffle. That being said, it falls short of the empeg player in many areas that are important to a lot of users (including myself.)

So, the question then becomes... Would it be easier to augment Squash in ways that would make it as user-friendly and full-featured as the empeg player, or to take Squash's primary asset (the music selection logic) and integrate it into the empeg player? The former is surely the larger task in terms of man-hours, whereas the latter would be yet another drain on the precious little empeg-hacking effort that the Cambridge boys can give us.

Of course, the benefits of having our own open source player would be great, but I'm pretty darn happy with the empeg player as it is, and anything I haven't been happy with I've been able to find ways to hack around. I don't know how much more advanced Squash's algorithm is beyond what's already available in empeg custom shuffle modes, but maybe we can all discuss that here, and generate some specific ideas about how to improve the intelligence and utility of the empeg player's shuffle modes. If it becomes clear that Squash is far and away the winner in the "DJ In a Box" category, then maybe it's worth considering how we'd approach the task of further developing Squash into a player that could compete with the empeg as an everyday player app.