MP3 meets Car Audio: Empeg Mark II in-dash Car MP3 Player

Emplode looks and feels like it has a Windows Explorer interface, however it functions in a very different manner.  You can simply drag your MP3s, directories and all, into the emplode windopw and the software will take over from there.  The empeg works on a database system, meaning that it doesn’t just place your MP3s in a bunch of folders, it actually has a database of all of your songs, their information and their location. 

Each directory/folder that you drag into emplode becomes a playlist, with subdirectories being playlists within playlists.  But dragging the files and folders into emplode doesn’t start the upload process immediately; instead the software allows you to organize your music and playlists the way you want to, then by clicking the synchronize button it proceeds to update the database and upload the files. 

This system works quite well once you get used to it, however emplode isn’t without its faults.  The most annoying problem we, as well as other emplode users have noticed is that dragging more than 500 – 700MB of songs at a time into emplode will often times crash the software.  This is much worse under Windows 9x than it is under Windows 2000 due to simple differences in the robustness of the OS, but if you have a player that can hold between 6GB and 36GB of MP3s, you should be able to drag at least half that amount at once without having the software crash on you.  Hopefully a future update of the software will address this issue, but it’s unacceptable to have in a shipping release of the software.

Another very annoying problem we noticed with emplode was that if you attempted to cut and paste a folder/playlist, the playlist would sometimes not paste properly in its new location and other times we’d see duplicates of the folder/playlist we just cut and pasted.  If the guys at empeg could make emplode work a little more like Windows Explorer it would help quite a bit. 

Don’t bother organizing your MP3s by filename, since filename is pretty much irrelevant under emplode.  Instead, emplode organizes your MP3s within their folders according to ID3 tags.  This is very useful as you will see later on, but it can be pretty annoying if you don’t have properly filled ID3 tags.  emplode and the empeg can recognize ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. 

Based on the information in each MP3’s ID3 tag, emplode will by default sort according to song title, but it will also record the artist’s name, album name, year, as well as any additional notes.