ID3V2 tags support lyrics, although I've yet to see anyone use this feature.

And that's really the only problem I see with the lyric tags in ID3v2... no one's using it right now. Even if Empeg spent the time to add the feature, there wouldn't be any files with the ID3v2 lyrics encoded unless you created the files yourself.

Not to mention the fact that if someone else gives you an MP3 file with lyrics, and they're not really the artist who wrote the song, you have to trust that they entered the lyrics correctly.

But still, wouldn't it be great if we had that feature? Having the Empeg scroll the lyrics would be so cool!

To answer the original question, though: "Can the empeg be hacked so that a third party could add this lyric feature?"

The answer is: Right now, not very easily because you'd have to completely replace the player software with a new from-scratch player of your own (only the Linux kernel is open-source).

But very soon, empeg will offer a plug-in architecture for creating visualization modules. Assuming that this architecture can return a handle to the MP3 file, then someone could easily write a "lyrics" visualization as a plug-in. It's projects like this that make us drool at the possibilities of a plug-in architecture. Toby, how's that coming? Will we see it in 1.1?

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Tony Fabris