A little bit of looking reminds me that the swapfile is /swapfile, which, if memory serves, is actually a link to a partition. Before you start your sync, try a ``swapon /swapfile'' and see if that helps. Afterwards, you should probably ``swapoff /swapfile'' to turn it back off. (Then again, it might be turned on during sync anyway, in which case, this is all useless.)

The player software itself enables swap during synchronisation and disables it afterwards.

I can't come up with a good reason that it would need ridiculous amounts of memory to do this sort of operation.

What about

/sbin/userinit: line 109: 36 Segmentation fault /empeg/bin/player

Does it still fail after a clean upgrade (i.e. with our init)? Are you running other stuff besides the player?

Peter