The only possible problem with downgrading is if the database format changes; however, at the worst case this would involve removing the database files and doing a sync to restore them.

Hugo

The only possible problem with downgrading is if the database format changes; however, at the worst case this would involve removing the database files and doing a sync to restore them.

Oh, OK. I was assuming keeping backups elsewhere and re-uploading if things really go banana. Everybody does that, right?

Borislav

No, that shouldn't be necessary; we're very unlikely to change the format of the *1 (metadata) files - just add stuff to them (which will get ignored by older versions).

I meant the packed databases that get rebuilt at the end of every sync.

Hugo

If you want to know how to upgrade you HDD(s) have a look in the FAQ section. Heaps of us have done it already.

(list 6284, Mk1 S/N 00299 4GB blue [for sale]. Mk2 S/N 080000094 26GB blue)

I no longer have any involvement with customer service, support or sales - but I assume that this would indeed be the case. I believe that a warranty is effectively a contract.

I don't know what's available for purchase, you'd have to ask support.

Rob

Yes, we have plenty of fleeces left!

Rob

The BBS was just returning mySQL errors for a while after the Slashdot story was posted, it is still a little slow (unsurprisingly).

__
Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

The BBS was just returning mySQL errors for a while after the Slashdot story was posted, it is still a little slow (unsurprisingly).

Ah, that was that! So, mySQL does not seem to be a good choice for really heavy load?


Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

Wow, where do I start? I'm a professional lurker here, but I like it that way. Many people have more to say, and usually say it better than I can, but I too feel I have to say something.

I've had my Mk2 for over a year now, and have enjoyed every second of it. I'm a Network Administrator, so I work with people who should "get it." Some do, but some don't, and I'm just not sure why... I had an almost religious debate with one of my coworkers yesterday. He contended that the Creative Jukebox was a better solution, since it was portable, and had a battery pack. Then there's another guy I work with. He loves it, and we showed it to his wife. Now SHE wants one.

I guess it's hard to predict who will really "get it", but for those of us that have, we've had something great. Yes, I know SonicBlue will continue with the code base, and pursue OEM contracts, but nothing produced from this will ever be as flexible as what we currently own.

I wouldn't trade the empeg for anything, and I too am seriously considering purchasing a second unit as a backup. This is one of those products that is so good, I just assumed it would always be there. I am actually heartbroken over this announcement.

I am still happy for the guys formerly known as empeg. Without their commitment to a "geek" project, I would never have owned the best car audio system available.

Thank you.

-Trevor

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Mk 2, Green 12GB, Tuner 080000349

Actually, we use MySQL on the i-club forums, and they see around 6 million hits per month. MySQL is just a bit resource hungry.

-Trevor

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Mk 2, Green 12GB, Tuner 080000349

Rob, sorry for cofusing you with Hugo in my yesterday's message. My appreciation obviously goes to all of you at emepeg.

Taym
_________________________
MK II BLUE/RED 12GB #923

sorry for cofusing you with Hugo in my yesterday's message

It happens all the time - we always have a chuckle when people confuse us for twin brothers.

Rob

It happens all the time - we always have a chuckle when people confuse us for twin brothers.

Those that have seen you two in person know better

/me ducks

Sheesh. I go to the UK for three days, come back, and everything's gone to hell.

Actually, I had a very strong sense this was coming. Tipoff?: the fleece. It told me that SonicBLUE's massive, ubiquitous advertising campaign just wasn't pushing headcount past the 3000 mark mentioned here. Even if SonicBLUE didn't stumble on a daily basis over things like eStore, the Empeg in its current incarnation would have continued to present a challenging business proposition, especially in the current economic recession that puts pressure on discretionary/luxury purchases. Multiply 3000 times, say, $1500 average, then multiply by modest end margin percent and you aren't talking about a very large pile of money. Most of the folks who were motivated to spend $1,000-$2,000 for Empeg's capability have already voted with their money -- "exhaustion of susceptibles" in epidemiologic terms. A tuner would have helped, but how much farther it would have helped Empeg penetrate into a consumer population that, on average, abhors complexity remains to be seen.

Dumbed-down, less complex OEM capability does seem to be the way to go. It would seem that there has to be some place for aftermarket applications, though. Otherwise, how to you get Empeg functionality in your Lear Jet? (or my distinctly un-Lear sailboat?)

When my Empeg dies 4-8 years from now, I suppose I'd like to replace it with something as capable as Empeg, but which has the storage (a la Phatnoise) in the trunk/boot, retains all of the display/control functionality of the current Empeg (but permanently installed in the dash), with some hack-ability, and software-based function/codec not tied to frightening media conglomerates (read: Sony and such). Will such a unit be there? I'm doubtful. Will I buy a 2nd "insurance" Empeg right now instead? (I don't know. Money/employment is tight.)

Funny, a few weekend ago I visited for the first time a friend's cabin about 2 hours east of Seattle. On the property he had another unique, capable EOL product -- a Cushman Trackster (try www.trackster.com). Not sure when this little 2-stroke tank went out of production, but there is a very active aftermarket still supporting these with spare parts, bogies, treads, etc. My friends are even planning to trailer theirs to Oregon for a 4-stroke Honda repower. Not sure how many of these were made, but it shows that EOL may not be, well, EOL. I'd venture to say, though, that there are probably 100 times as many as potential Trackster mechanics running about as there are Empeg mechanics. Hugo and Patrick, please eat healthy food and drive safely!

To everybody at Empeg, thanks, indeed, for all the fish.

Jim

Yeah the slashdot forum was disappointing. This whole Linux/open source movement isn't going to get anywhere when the techs are criticizing each other and refusing to think unconventionally. Just imagine how much progress would be made if everyone banded together on one or two Linux distributions instead of 10-20 or however many.

The Empeg Car appears to be truly ahead of its time and most people won't appreciate it for another year or so when big name brands start doing the same thing. I'm just happy to be able to enjoy this product for years while the rest of the people figure it out.

My worry now is that it will be stolen and I won't be able to replace it. My compliments to the Empeg team.. you guys are amazing.

-Hoagy.

What will make a product like this commercially viable is if it had an onboard CD player which could encode the MP3's directly from disk. If people didn't have to dock into their computer at all...just insert disk and its encoded and stored.. Then it would be dummified enough to sell to the masses. Oh...it has to be under $1000 too.

Anyway, I'll echo other questions about how hard in the future will it be for us to get replacement parts such as faceplates, handles, knobs, etc...?? From the sounds of it, it may be quite some time before anything even CLOSE to the MK2 comes out on the market from anybody again. That means I have to find a way to make my MK2 keep on ticking for a long time into the future.

I have to say...that I am very very dissapointed as well. after spending $2000 for a MK2, expecting many future updates, upgrades and at the very least ongoing support...it will be very sad when the day comes that it doesn't work any more or the faceplace is cracked and I can't replace it or some such thing...and nothing else remotely comparable to buy to replace it either.

See the Pioneer or Sony in-dash jukeboxes that are due next year. Neither is in the sub-$1000 market though, from what I've heard of pricing.

Hugo

What will make a product like this commercially viable is if it had an onboard CD player which could encode the MP3's directly from disk. If people didn't have to dock into their computer at all...just insert disk and its encoded and stored.. Then it would be dummified enough to sell to the masses. Oh...it has to be under $1000 too.

Like this?. It meets those demands in all ways except cost. People expect this to be magicially cheep for some reason. (I suffer this to an extent as well, as seen by my price range on a home jukebox.)

I guess once that comes out, thats our replacement. Hopefully the work being done with OEM's will evenually surface to the consumer market, so that way I don't have to buy a new car to get my next empeg.

One more thing. I do want to thank the guys at Empeg for being so supportive online and all that... But I have to say...I feel violated.

Empeg basically developed a beta product. Sold it to us at a quite high price. Used us as beta testers to develop their technology. Got ideas from us and integrated many of those ideas into their technology...and then sold their technology to the highest bidder, which in this case was Sonicblue. A company who does not care about supporting this particular product. They really only wanted the software to put into their other products. Basically we all got screwed folks.

I'll use my MK2 until the day it dies and I'll love every minute of it, but the fact remains....I feel totally screwed over by SonicBlue.

I can understand why the Empeg guys did it. Hell, I work for a startup company myself. We all want to be financially successful. Congradulations Rob and Hugo...you've made it. But we are getting screwed. Plain and simple.

Financially, it was an OK deal; not hugely brilliant. We did it because we felt very exposed as a small company, and we simply couldn't fund the manufacture - Steve, who co-founded the company with me and handled the financial side, was very white a lot of days from juggling payments. The options were to sell our souls to VCs and an uncertain (and uncontrollable) future, or get bought by someone in the same business.

We, the people who made the empeg still feel very strongly about keeping it supported, and will do what we can in terms of things like parts support into the future - but the situation would have been the same if a mk3 had come out.

The mk2 was never going to be made indefinitely; we still have plenty of mk1 spares though it hasn't been manufactured for a while (apart from sleds...!)

Wait until you use v2.0 and then tell me you feel "screwed over"; there's not a lot futher you can go with the same box and the same buttons, it fills the holes that people wanted filling. Do you feel used when Sony brings out a new TV that replaced the model you own?

Hugo

I don't feel screwed. OK, my first empeg was an MK2, but I have never really had a horrible problem with it. I also feel that the price is justified.

Now that it's all over, I feel honored to have been a part of the the greatest car stereo ever made. Not even anticipating 2.0 or VR, it will still be the greatest for a long time.

Empeg is/was revolutionary. Years after it's introduction there is still no product that can touch it. Furthermore, I believe there will never be anything as flexible or tweak-able... even products based on Empeg's software.

I would like to wish good luck to everyone at Empeg for moving on to bigger (not likely better) things. Serving a niche market (let's face it, empeg is not for everyone) is hard. The only thing that helped Empeg survive this long is it's sheer greatness. Thanks for making it!

-Rob
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12GB MK2 Blue 090000736 (6166 in the queue)

I might as well join in with a 'me too' posting here, since it seems to be the thing to do. I got my MK2 just over a year ago, I just recently added in the tuner, and I've got a 48GB IBM drive that I'll be installing this weekend, bringing me up to 60GB of storage.

The Slashdot crowd doesn't get it, and it's sad. Even though my daily commute is all of fifteen minutes each way, I'm still hooked on the empeg. I have over 3000 songs at my fingertips. Most of the time, I have it all playing at random, but when the mood strikes I'll flip it over to playing a specific album or a specific subgenre. I've got things extensively classified into subdirectories with all kinds of cross-linking to make this easier (e.g., I can play the 5-CD Ken Burns Jazz collection from one subdirectory, or I can go into my Louis Armstrong directory which includes links to the Armstrong tracks in the Ken Burns collection). These features are particularly wonderful when doing longer drives, such as the roughly four hour drive from Houston to Dallas.

Most of the time, my empeg stays out in the car, but I'll bring it inside once every few weeks to copy over the latest MP3s that I just ripped. I'll also take it out if I'm parking my car in what I'd consider a 'high risk' parking lot (such as the underground parking lot downtown where my old car stereo got stolen...).

Clearly, the number one problem here has been a failure of marketing. You look at the Slashdot weenies, and they don't get it. It shouldn't be incumbent on users like us to evangelize to them. It should have been the responsibility of SonicBlue. Did they take out banner ads on Slashdot? Did they take out full page adverts in car audio magazines? The initial sales were driven by word of mouth, but to expand outward you need to advertise.

A secondary failure is the product price. I had to take a deep gulp before typing my credit card number into the web site to buy the thing, despite my deep desire to have it. Yes, I know, empeg gives you fantastic bang for the buck, but many people are entirely willing to get less bang if it will cost them less. One possible solution would have been to make the empeg fixed in the dash and have some kind of pull-out hard drive like the IBM Microdrive. Sure, it's not nearly as fun as the current situation (1GB of Microdrive vs. up to 96GB of dual laptop hard drives), but I'll bet it's cheaper to manufacture.

Still, nobody's writing SonicBlue's obituary. The new OEM strategy looks like it could be a big winner. Certainly, TiVo has done quite well with other folks manufacturing their boxes for them. Given that SonicBlue's ReplayTV is manufactured by Matsushita (Panasonic), I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the empeg finds its way there as well.

We'll just have to see...

I counted six statements within your email which I believe to be totally inaccurate. In a number of those cases you couldn't possibly know the truth so you probably shouldn't comment on them really.

I'm rather confused that you love every minute of your player yet you feel totally screwed over. I have to say that I own a lot of products that I don't love for every minute I use them and on the whole I don't feel that I've been screwed over by them. If I loved a product I'd bought I'd be pretty damn happy all things considered.

Rob

I think the biggest issue that so many of us see is that we are not just seeing a product hitting end of life, we are seeing an entire market space going away. Nothing else in the market comes close to matching the features, or company behind the product. Had the Mk3 come out, an upgrade path would have existed when the Mk2 stopped meeting the needs of people for one reason or another.

I really hope I am able to enjoy the musical freedom the empeg gave me many years down the road, in one form or another.

And, much the EOL of the RioCar may bum people out, I'm much more bummed by the closing of BizTravel.com, my favorite online travel agent, which used to pay refunds if a plane was late or delayed. They were amazing, and they could often find much better routes to obscure cities even than the new sites like Orbitz.

*Sigh.* The economy needs to get back on track already...

for situations like these, i really feel that it would have been appropriate for you guys to install some sort of remote self destruction device in each empeg. when problems like these arise, you can simply melt the empeg down from cambridge. but then again, is it worth it to destroy one of the finest car stereos ever made? a tough decision.

rest assured that i, and certainly most of the empeg community do not feel that way. i knew that i was buying a beta product from a small company that had only been in existance for a short while. like others have said, i love every minute of using the empeg (except when my wife makes me listen to her playlist, but thats another story). i want to thank you guys for all your hard work and dedication to such a great product. it really has been a pleasure to own it. i am looking forward to using it for a long time to come, and also looking forward to what you guys can accomplish for the car audio word in general.

sincerely,
jeremy

12 gig, green...

I've been a fan of the empeg thing, since the original mp3man, it's allways been a great idea, way ahead of it's time.. I'm feeling the same way as he did.

#1: I love my empeg, I wait on the list patiently for a year while the mk1 turned into the mk2, and finaly arrived on my doorstep.

#2: I'm glad the software development will still continue, and I hope that the software will be released in the future with a modular design that will let users do some addon development.. (i'll put in time to write plugins, but not a whole car software)

#3: I'm dissapointed that the hardware thing was "a valuable addition to the sonic blue product line" and then neatly tossed asside when it wasn't perfectly profitable. I'm just glad that if demand arises in the future, the ease of the custom manufacturing of the thing could produce a lot of 1000 for sale. (anyone want to start a web petition on a lot by lot basis?)

#4: I have to say to all my friends that they can't get the empeg anymore.. that's the worst part.. I know people who would love to have it, but were just waiting for the $ to become available.

Hopefully in a year or two, the comonent costs will come down, the US/world economy will pickup again, and we will again have empeg's for sale. I think i'm going to take a chunck from my next paycheck to buy an extra sled, and a 2nd remote.

rob, hugo.. you done good.

12gig red mk2 -- 080000125

I wouldn't suggest that TiVo has done that well. They really haven't had much market penetration and they even have been advertising on TV. That market will definitely be there but who knows if TiVo can stay alive.

I think it's a mixture of climate and technical savy required to properly operate it. Despite Tony and everyone's efforts, the empeg remains for the geeks early adopters.

As to feeling taking advantage of, I can see where one feels like a tool of SonicBlue's.
Promised features were put on the back burner more than occasionally for secret projects under the premise that we, as consumers would be happy with what's coming.
It's like put up or shut up and SonicBlue has chosen the later. I put faith in the empeg team that 2.0 will come to fruittion and there may even be developments beyond that. I, being beyond warranty, just hate the thought of not being able to replace my unit even though I have insurance.

Times are tough and the tough need to get going and lean up a bit. SonicBlue owes nothing to the owners. We have a working product, some of the promised features have yet to appear, but you could've happily saved your money had you not been an early adopter or seen the potential to hack your car stereo as a really good thing.

What seems to mean the most to me is that there is not one single post from Tony Fabris in this thread. He, in my opinion, has the most cause to feel ripped off.
Guys at empeg and Tony, thanks for the great product. My life will not be the same when it stops working or gets lost/stolen.

Let's keep this community alive.

As usual I have to agree with Rob.

Yes, I suppose you could feel like you have been used as a beta tester pulling this thing out of context and distorting what really happend. But I am sorry if I have to burst a bubble here and let you in on a little public secret. That's how EVERY consumer product works, for the small to the big. Do you think Pioneer or Alpine or whatever other carbrand one day sat down and designed a fully featured headunit that would last for ever ? Hell no, they design something, sell it, learn from their mistakes, take that knowledge and improve upon it and sell you a new headunit at which the cycle repeats. The same holds true for just about any other product. Think of my all time favorite : Microsoft Windows.

Yes, you can debate on wether that is supposed to make you feel any better or not but truth be said, at least our Empeg will still get software updates and with that new features (I hope) for a while (hopefully a long while). In the end I don't like it either but it can't be helped. I totally agree that it is a major bummer, but I strongly disagree that I feel screwed over.

Cheers


Mk2 - Blue & Red - 080000431