I've been running the Entempo for some time, and while its interface is quirky, and it leaves a lot to be desired in the responsiveness category, I'm pretty happy with it.

One gripe is that the "random mode" doesn't play so randomly. Especially when picking from the list of tracks. I found that by starting with a different song I could get a different series of songs. It is sadly the case, however, that the "next" song is fairly predictable. That is, you can reliably expect certain songs to play after other songs, right down the line. To break this trend, you can skip to the next or "previous" song (by double-tapping the rewind control, which, in fact, is not the previous song) until you find a new song not in the series, but that can be hit or miss.

I found a group on Yahoo! dedicated to the Entempo Spirit. I could have found it before I dropped my hundred bucks, but even if the device fails as an MP3 player, it's a dirt-cheap, fairly large portable storage device; it cost about the same as my 1GB thumb-drive, but has 20GB of space on it.

Anyhoo... I found on the group that making a play list is the key. Since I'm trying to use LINUX to control the device, I can't just whip up a DOS short-name friendly batch file to create random scripts, but there is a manageable play list creator on the device.

Now, I've ripped 270-ish disks, according to the listing on my network's MP3 storage, with some 5,000-ish tracks. Using the on-device play list creator took some time, but now there's a short-filename friendly list on there, and the random mode does work much better.

In fact, I'm hearing so many B-side songs that I wonder sometimes if I've got someone else's device! Of course, it's just that I've got the wife's disks mixed in with mine.

So the Entempo has moved from a solid C to a B- device. It seems from both the Entempo website and the Yahoo! group that the firmware is frequently updated ('though the last was in December 2004), so perhaps they'll get some of the interface quirks worked out.

Heck, I'll help.