Guys,

As much as I love this software, we need to face reality, and that reality is, that its no more. The same happened with SmartBar XP, no updates for ages, then, an announcement that dev. is no longer going on.

If anyone has an alternative program, I'd really appreciate a U2U, cause it seems this thing is going nowhere.

I keep crossing my fingers here, hoping that's not the case..... as to options, there are a few but none as nice as EJ Some lack a good deal of features. Or they don't have a similar rating system or something.

I checked out JRiver Media some time ago, before finding Ej. Frankly I don't remember much about it, but EJ won me over to the point I jumped to dig out my credit card from the sock drawer. LOL Nothing else has moved me in such a way.

I think we should be a little careful so we don't create a self-fullfilling-prophecy for ej. As I don't think audiosoft has a lot of interest in continue development if users keep on putting out rumours that the development cycle lies dead all the time.
Don't know but I would prefer that a new version is released twice a year instead of never.

I agree that it's worrying that they don't ask questions around bugreports in the forum anymore, as well as not releasing a report of 4.0 progress more often. That is so we don't have to guess if they are still working on it, and start wondering if the project is dead. I sure hope development still is going on and that a beta is released soon, so they can get proper feedback and release a stable and solid product at the end of the day.

There are no clear cut alternatives to ej. Not that I know of at least. I have yet to see a program of this kind with such an elegant albumlist and popularity tracking.

Good talk Fishy. Bravo!

Only a few weeks ago I ran some extensive tests on several new Jukebox-type programs, who seem to be growing like mushrooms these days, inluding JRiver and also the one that was mentioned in a post here last week. I was suprised to find that some of these programs offer a lot, and I mean really a lot of functionality. Many things that I would like to see in eJukebox and many creative ideas that I hadn't even thought of before.

But when it comes down to usefulness, they were all lacking some BASIC features that eventuelly led me to erase them from my disk again. What is, for example, the point of a Kiosk mode when you can exit this Kiosk mode by just clicking on a big [X] button? And just the overall presentation and handling, none of these programs came even close to Ejukebox.

So I really really hope that Audiosoft manages to pull it off. If the SW could be just a bit faster on a 10000-track collection and a few bugs ironed out, it would beat all other programs by a mile.

EJ already beats everything else... hands down IMO. I looked at many solutions before I found this one, and never looked back. I'm remaining optimistic that 4.0 will blow the 3x out of the water, and patience is key here. The problem I see is a lot of new folks trying, buying and finding the current slump in CS. Those folks don't know what we all know in how things changed, very quickly with all of our ideas implimented in one form or another. Audiosoft was very receptive to our input to make EJ the best there is. And really the price isn't bad either for the function we get. I'm sure he is either quite busy with other things, or debugging code up to his eyes and hasn't crawled out of the code to look up other than maybe to eat a slice of cold pizza. I know I've been there. I never took on code to the level of EJ, but I'm sure it's not a lot different. I used to run my own BBS many years ago, and dove into C to make it mine, then of course fix all the typos I created LOL in the code. Computers are such literal things, they just don't think like we do.

Keep up your hard work Audiosoft, it's hard but I'll be patient and anxious to see the next offering.

6-months of inactivity and I'm sure we've all done the rounds of looking for other eJ type software on the Net. Other vendors are coming close - very close, but not jet as quality as eJ (that's quality in terms of functionality, not necessarily reliability).

Don't get me wrong - I will switch from eJ to another vendor with no hesitation or remorse as soon as I find one that's better. No vendor currently is, that's why I'm writing here instead of on another BBS supporting another product.

Let's hope we don't meet each other on another BBS because I believe eJ4 will indeed materialise shortly as stated by Audiosoft.

That is firmly my belief.

The problem is that we always talk like Audiosoft is a huge company. Be realistic, it's ONE person--with other commitments obviously.

My theory is that there's certainly an intent to update the product, but almost no time to actually do so. If we hang around it will likely be done eventually, but it could take forever.

If we really want to be useful though, rather than grouse about things we can't control, we should lobby Audiosoft to consider making the program open source, so that perhaps someone else can take the program up and develop it. This is not uncommon in a situation where a product is not likely to sell more copies, can only be improved sporadically if at all, but has a decent existing base of enthusiasts.

Of course all of this will sound silly if the upgrade is secretly around the corner, but if things really stand like I think they do perhaps it is worth considering.

Ok jhlurie...
Personally I think "the upgrade is secretly around the corner". But now, like each of us I'm impatient:

I wait for the "APRIL" update!