Hi.

A friend of mine, Jon Andrews, whom you may remember from such projects as this, got a bit carried away with the software he wrote for the thing and basically kept going. The end result is pretty much a clone of the empeg player software, admittedly currently missing one or two things but also having several options the original didn't have. He wrote it to run on a Raspberry Pi, driving a display board I did for him with a 256x64 OLED display, IR, buttons, and rotary encoder, which oddly enough looks almost exactly like the empeg panel...

However, I mentioned that he should make sure it ran on the original empeg hardware. He complained that this would be too hard, but did it anyway It works on all versions of the empeg. It will play files from network sources or from local storage, has visuals, can be controlled by a remote, uses the original controls, and so on. He's adding tuner support soon.

One quite neat addition is a master/slave mode, where one player can be designated as the master, and others as slaves, which will then act as repeaters of whatever the master is playing. Unfortunately at the moment the empeg-native version doesn't quite have the power to run a master mode player, but it runs slave mode perfectly. He has players that run on the empeg, the RPI, and normal PC linux. Porting it to other devices would be fairly simple.

He has a sourceforge page where the code will live here, although there's nothing there at the time I'm posting this as he is writing some documentation. It should be up within the next day or two.

The player requires a late version of Hijack to be installed, but other than that replaces the original empeg player software completely.

pca