Overview

emphatic - a frontend for the empeg car player

What is emphatic?
emphatic is, in essence, a frontend application for the empeg car player. It allows you to customize your player's user interface to your liking, giving you full control over the look and feel of the player app.

Features
Using emphatic, you can...

... control the way your track information is displayed on the empeg display with custom display modes
... display ID3v2 fields not normally available in player info modes
... select a specific visual to be shown for each custom display mode
... display song lyrics synchronized with the music, and scrolled in horizontal or vertical fashion
... customize your player's menu system, putting menu options where you want them
... assign ratings to your music and use the song rating data in weighted shuffle modes
... perform searches of your music library without the use of a remote control

Screenshots
Here are a few screenshots of emphatic in action:

emphatic's customizable menu	a horizontal lyrics mode
a "big horizontal" lyrics mode	a vertical lyrics mode

Acknowledgements
I've had a lot of fun developing this software over the past couple years. It's been a real labor of love, and has often been a project I turned to when assignments at work weren't quite as satisfying. While I've poured a lot of effort into this software, I could never have done it without the help of my friends in the empeg community. With that in mind, I'd like to publicly thank several individuals and groups without whom this program would have never existed:

Patrick Giasson, who wrote the first working lyrics viewer for the empeg, and whose code I used as a starting point for this software
Mark Lord, whose Hijack kernel has given developers a real reason to write software on the empeg, and whose expertise I've leaned on many times
Tony Fabris and Derrick Brashear, for having the courage to try out my alpha releases
Trevor Man, for offering programming assistance at almost any time of the day or night
Richard Kirby, whose outstanding vfdlib API made doing the display stuff a whole lot easier than it used to be
The entire community on the Unofficial Empeg BBS, for giving me a place to spend my idle moments at work
And, of course, "the empeg lads" for making this wonderful gadget in the first place