I'm lovin it - or not.

Hi All,

I don't often post, but have owned an empeg for a number of years. I read (or stalk) this bbs on a bi-weekly basis and have enjoyed the sigkill, international solidarity, humour and not least help of so many people that contribute to this great community.

But to be blunt (could you see this coming?), I have a gripe! I love the carplayer with its pca tuner, I use it on a daily basis as the only headunit in my car.

But it has flaws, 99% have been solved by looking here, but after 5 years of owning one, they are becoming sigkill so much more apparent. I'm aware this is becoming a rant, but I've had a few beers so I'll keep going...

Is v3a11 the furthest the empeg can go?

and...

If so (wait while I duck), why is v3a so much 'worse' than v2b13 that was released ~4 years ago?

cheers,

Raas

"a" is for "alpha", "b" is for "beta". Wikipedia probably defines those terms nicely but, in brief, "beta" means "almost release quality", and "alpha" means "experimental quality (ie. buggy)".

To answer the question more fairly, v3a11 is a regression (w.r.t. sigkills et al.) because it involved a major shift in the underlying code base -- massive changes.

Cheers

V2 was a development branch specific to the car player, which was a supported product at that time. Testing, debugging and all those good things were carried out and the resultant v2-final is very stable as a result.

V3 is a sort of bonus release. Its development branch was dedicated to the Rio Karma and other new products. Keeping the car player target alive was a personal undertaking for some of the developers, who largely put in the necessary effort in their own time (and who had a software manager who tolerated/encouraged this!). We wanted to release from that branch because it has a whole new audio path, support for additional formats, and many new features over V2. However there was no official testing and no official sanction from the owners of the codebase (at that time) to do any of this for the car player. The most recent V3 releases were developed as specials to coincide with owners meets, thanks to a few individuals (notably Peter and Dave) giving up their weekends to do this. Now, from what I hear, even the V3 branch has been deprecated, tucked up, and put to bed - perhaps permanantly.

I would be surprised if there is another release - and if there is, it will be thanks to an individual digging out the code and putting in their own time to work on it. As there are increasingly few empeg developers remaining at Sigmatel (who own the code), this seems unlikely. I'd like to be proved wrong.

In practice, I choose to run V3 (and have done so for the last couple of years) as its quirks are fairly well understood and are generally easy to avoid or work around.

Rob

Thankyou for the honest response.

I develope software and know the red tape and issues often found. In all honesty I assumed alpha led to beta which led to.. well whatever, if there's no chance of that, or no-one available then v3a11 is the final nail!

Thanks again.

So, for the few of us out here not getting it, what is a "sigkill"?

Wikipedia to the rescue again, SIGKILL.

I know what a sigkill is. I don't get why it appears in his post unless he is trying to make some odd point. In which case I still don't get it.

It appears in a tiny popup box on the front panel display of his empeg (courtesy of Hijack), just about every time that the player s/w crashes.

Quote:
I would be surprised if there is another release - and if there is, it will be thanks to an individual digging out the code and putting in their own time to work on it.

Unfortunately it's not even as simple as that. Some components of a car-player build, notably the MP3 decoder, were licensed to Rio in such a way that the licences didn't pass to Sigmatel when the development team was purchased, last July. That's why we hurried 3.0 alpha 11 out in the few days between finding out about Sigmatel, and the purchase going through: once we became Sigmatel, we had to delete those components, and the car v3 branch no longer built.

I too would be surprised if there were any more car-player releases. Really, alphas 10 and 11 should have been called betas 1 and 2, as those releases were made from the v3-only branch; all the earlier alphas contained random new Karma, Sapphire, and Kyanite features from the trunk, so their stability was all over the shop. Alphas 10 and 11 contained only bugfixes over alpha 8, the branching point. (Alpha 9 was a bit of a disaster IIRC.) There's a bit more on that subject here -- outcome #2 came to pass.

Personally, I've used 3.0alpha11 Receiver Edition day in, day out since it was released -- or rather, since an hour or so before it was released -- and it only falls over very occasionally. If you've got a player which didn't sigkill very much when it first got alpha 11, but does sigkill a lot now, maybe your hardware's getting flaky...

Peter