the "soup" is the lump of all your music when it's not in playlists ... it also refers to dynamically created playlists as views onto that lump of music (like "Artists" or "Albums"). So a "search soup" is a dynamic playlist based on a search string (say "artist = 'james taylor' and year > 1980") and every time you add a tune to your Empeg it would automatically appear in that playlist if it matched the search string. ms

Does the empeg explicitly spin down the disks?

Yes. Disks, even laptop ones, have much much better vibration tolerance when spun down. That's important in a vehicle. Also, much less heat is produced when spun down; in some installs, that's important too.

We could just have set the IDE auto-spindown timer, but seeing as we know exactly what the disk access pattern is (in the steady state, it's "cache frantically for two seconds, then do nothing for five minutes, then repeat") we can control the spin explicitly so it's only up for those two seconds, and is spun down the moment it's not needed rather than waiting for a timeout.

or is it just that mounting them read-only does so fairly well? I guess I'm asking if there's a difference between a disk-spun-down db and a regular db that's running on a readonly disk...

The player software needs to be able to get at the data instantly. It can take up to five seconds to wake up a spun-down disk. Imagine how much it would annoy you if going into the Playlists menu or the search screen waited for five seconds before it could show you anything!

(Yes, the disk always spins up when you go into the Playlists menu or the search screen. But that's because it's hopefully going to take you at least five seconds to choose what you want to listen to, so it can start getting music off the disk instantly once you've chosen, rather than waiting five seconds then. The menu appears and is usable long before the spin-up completes. It's attention to details like that which is why you bought an Empeg in the first place.)

The tension is between on the one hand needing to keep all that data in a limited amount of RAM, and on the other being able to access it flexibly and efficiently. The database on the Rio Central is indexed up the wazoo and can (and does) soup to its heart's content, but the data ends up about 30Mb in size on a fullish player, and the thing ships with a 128Mb swap partition which at times (e.g. database rebuild) it's pretty glad of.

But as Rob implies, I have a Cunning Plan(TM), which would be nice to get onto the car-player sooner or later. But that would be waaaay in post-2.0-land.

Peter

In reply to:

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Yes, the disk always spins up when you go into the Playlists menu or the search screen. But that's because it's hopefully going to take you at least five seconds to choose what you want to listen to, so it can start getting music off the disk instantly once you've chosen, rather than waiting five seconds then. The menu appears and is usable long before the spin-up completes.

It's attention to details like that which is why you bought an Empeg in the first place

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To be honest, its attention to detail like these that I was hoping I would be getting in the product when I bought two of them...

...I wasn't disappointed.

Its details like that why I bought another two during the firesale.

Its also a lack of attention to those details, why perhaps some of those other (but admittedly, sometimes, cheaper) products don't sell so well.

Thanks again for being so forward thinking - I wish more products were like my Empeg.

It is however a pity the Empeg and RioCars don't have a ton more memory in them that we could use to cache this sort of thing internally in RAM.

Call me hungry, but what is soup?

I know it was already explained in this thread, but I need to get my requisite FAQ Link in here.

Besides, mine has pictures.

"Yes, the disk always spins up when you go into the Playlists menu or the search screen."

So I guess leaving the menu or search screen open for a long time is not a good thing? I think I've done this before.

Ah, but in my defense, I searched the FAQ for "soup". It doesn't come up in search.

"Yes, the disk always spins up when you go into the Playlists menu or the search screen."

So I guess leaving the menu or search screen open for a long time is not a good thing?

It times out and spins down eventually. Attention to details...

Peter

RAM at the time was costing us a lot; we did look at using 64Mbit chips on the Mk1 and original Mk2, but there seemed to be a 300% disconnect from the price of RAM to the consumer and what we could buy reels of chips for.

Someone, somewhere, was making a pile. I seem to remember that the 12MB on the Mk2 was costing us something like $30, which was daylight robbery, but we needed to be buying in 100,000's to get decent pricing.

We were planning a mk2b as an interim (after 1000 mk2a's) which was going to move to the SA1110; we would have lost some speed (206Mhz vs 221Mhz) but would have moved to 32MB of SDRAM which is a lot cheaper than EDO due to the PC uses. It never happened, as Rio were desparate to make thousands of the original (expensive!) design instead of letting me & Christoph do some cost reduction work on the box.

Hugo

very nice.

I use Emplode almost exclusively as it is much faster and more stable than Jemplode on the machine I use and I don't understand why a soup view is desirable - I can always find the stuff I want within seconds so that's all I need.

The only thing I do use Jemplode for is changing my boot animations. I would probably use it for hijack updates except it gets upset when I try it. Seems to want to be able to connect to the internet and not just use a supplied zImage file and I don't ever want to connect that machine to the outside world.

The only extra I would love to see in Emplode is the ability to continue editing playlists etc, or queue up music uploads while a sync is happening ready for the next sync.

I prefer Emplode to JEmplode simply because it works better for me. JEmplode frequently cannot find the files to upload to the player (returns null_pointer error message). Emplode works every time.

My only concern with Emplode is the fact it does not generate a report on duplicate file "problems".

Ah, but in my defense, I searched the FAQ for "soup". It doesn't come up in search.

Very odd! It should have come up.

Here's what I get when I do it:

You should try out the latest jEmplode prerelease and see if it is any better ... I cleaned up a lot of these little issues.

I'm not using Jemplode and don't know if it has this feature I request, but this would be a great kickass feature!

- The ability to save (and then load) settings

As I posted yesterday in Bug Reports forum, my player lose all the settings and I have to re-set all... not a big work since the EQ was still intact, but it would be a useful feature.
It would be nice if we can save all user settings like time format, balance, fader, dimmer, beep and most important the EQ settings.

Linux.

Building Linux into emplode? God, wouldn't it be bloated?

And then you have the fun of trying to get patches you need into it, and play political games...

Oh, I just happened to think of one. Every time I add new songs to a playlist, I have to then hit the little "AZ" icon to sort the files by artist. I'd like a "by default, sort like this" feature. Maybe even tiered:

First sort by artist A-Z
Then sort by title A-Z

-Christian

FITNR, kinda. I added an option to the Tools menu that sorts playlists by title, and tracks by track number. It starts from the currently selected playlist and recurses. It'll usually do what you want.

If I get time, I might add more tweakability.

This concerns me.

I'm just getting caught back up with some recent threads, but I have to say that this is an example of why I try to do so: software guy for EOL product asks "What else can I do?"

Cambridge, I salute you!! Mschrag, I salute you!!

Roger, I use both packages. Hmmm, what could you do? Well, cross-compile on Linux would be good as my Windows desktop is starting to take a secondary role.

Oh, and I don't know that it is strictly related to Emplode, but when Ogg support appears, I will have to call up and (assuming I am still employed!) order some Satay, Phad Thai, Tom Hah Gai....

Damn, now we're either going to have to give you alpha team membership or pay for our own Thai a while longer

Rob

WoooooooooooooooooooooHoooooooooooooooooooooo......!!!!!!!!!!

1. Ogg/Flac support in Emplode ... (Pick up the tags, and drop the files in the DB). Even if the commercial player doesn't support it yet, we've got a 3rd party player that's coming along that does.

2. "Smart synching" between Emplode and a folder heirarchy. You mentioned something similar about a year ago on some thoughts you had for it.

3. Scan for duplicates ... Some means of finding songs that are at least close in title. I find for a big music archive, I get some unnecessary duplication. This "closeness" would mean taking into account minor spelling differences and an additional word in the title (like 'The') and such...

Greg

How about being able to delete more than one playlist at a time. I recently had to delete a few hundred playlists and it wasn't very fun.

How about being able to delete more than one playlist at a time

I have no problem doing that.

Well I'll be durn...

FITPR ?