Phooey!

Well, that doesn't really help me in the next hour or two until I get home, I suppose.

If only I'd asked a couple of weeks ago.

Well it SHOULD be there. It may not display anything until it has calculated the BPM, which requires one complete play through of the track from start to finish.

Aaaaaaah! Now I've found it! It indeed required a complete play though of the track. It then gets inserted in the Track details menu.

Thanks Rob!

All this hype about the great new features that were supposed to be in 2.0 final, but i'm not seeing anything really.

Try using 1.03 for a day and then say that!

The hype of which you speak is presumably mainly the hype before the car-player was discontinued? All car-player work since September 2001 has essentially been done in our spare time -- I hope I'm not sounding old-fashioned when I say that, at least as far as I'm concerned, it was a matter of honour not to strand the community on version 1.03, with its various shortcomings. Without official support or scheduling, there were many things we wanted to bring you in 2.0 which we could not. There are even some, hopefully not too irritating, remaining minor bugs in 2.0; such is not the Empeg Way, but under the circumstances making a release sooner rather than later seemed sensible. We all hope that there will be 3.x for the car-player. But the future of Empeg, let alone the car-player, depends on a favourable outcome to Sonicblue's asset sales adventure; we can make no guarantees. Not even Greg Ballard could.

I for one am grateful to Sonicblue for even permitting the skunkworks development of 2.0 (or for turning a blind eye, whichever they did). Other companies might not have been so understanding. Subsequent owners of Empeg might not be so understanding. That is why we needed to release 2.0 now, despite its obvious lack of Vorbis support, cross-fading, automatic self-EQ or voice recognition.

Had Sonicblue lived, we should have had a car-player to tell which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.

Peter

automatic self-EQ or voice recognition.

Damn, are you dropping feature hints now?

/me wonders if I'm merely duplicating something they've already done in the 3.0 trunks

Auto EQ is a personal project of John G, nobody is working on VR right now. What project are you referring to?

Rob

What project are you referring to?

Genixia is working on auto-EQ, too. Surely you've seen his threads on the topic?

I mostly only get time to read General and of course the occassional Iraq thread when I need to relax.

/me wonders if I'm merely duplicating something they've already done in the 3.0 trunks

Even if you are (and I may be stepping outside of NDA to say this, but this is the first I've heard of auto-EQ in reference to the 3.0 trunk), 3.0 is pretty far off, so I think there would be significant benefit to having a 2.0 auto-EQ feature right now.

And since it's a personal project of John G's, perhaps you two could correspond and compare notes.

I mostly only get time to read General and of course the occassional Iraq thread when I need to relax.

Heh. I guess we have differing ideas about relaxation.

In any case, the thread with the acorn of Genixia's auto-EQ project lies here. I suspect that John G's project may have started because of the information that Genixia published there (something similar to "I'll show this to the EQ people" was said in that thread... ).

this is the first I've heard of auto-EQ in reference to the 3.0 trunk

I think John may have only come up with the design at the pub last night, and even then most of the evening was taken up with deciding who would play what instrument in the empeg band. When I left empeg towers this evening he seemed to be making a lot of progress, but it's probably a bit of an advantage to be the co-designer of the player filter graph. It makes a lot more sense to slot this kind of thing into the filter network than trying to hack at 2.0.

I'm sure he'd love to touch base with Genixia on this.

Rob

Don't worry, I'm going to continue...

Auto-EQ from hijack/userland is a long way off anyway. For now, I'm aiming to get to the point where we can automatically measure and log the response for offline analysis.

There's 3 hurdles after that point before we get to full auto-eq;
1) Crunching the response numbers to obtain the required EQ to flatten it. Not an easy task within itself.
2) Changing those numbers into EQ coefficients. Unfortunately the DSP programming manual doesn't contain the algorithms used to do this - it simply refers to a DOS utility that doesn't appear to be freely and easily available. We know that the empeg guys have essentially duplicated this utility within the player application, so either they reverse-engineered it, or were given the algorithm. Either way, they're probably bound by NDA from telling me. (Although I could hope!)
3) Finding out where in the scratch partition to store the coefficients. We've been warned that this is subject to change.

Actually, that's made me pause for thought. I wonder if the scratch storage really contains the DSP coefficients, or the 'raw' EQ data in 'human' form (ie f, Q and dB). If the latter, then that would make life significantly easier wrt point 2.

I'm sure he'd love to touch base with Genixia on this.

Well, he knows where to find me

1) Crunching the response numbers to obtain the required EQ to flatten it. Not an easy task within itself. 2) Changing those numbers into EQ coefficients.

I agree that would be tricky. I think I even commented on it, in a previous discussion on this topic. Basically, I showed a screen output from SpectraLAB that looked like a stock market graph. How the heck could a simple algorithm decide the best way to flatten that with only ten bands of EQ?

You know what I'd be happy to see? Something do-able without having to implement complex AI to create EQ coefficients?

Continuous sweeping up and down sine waves output by the DSP, with the screen showing a continuously-updated third-octave analyzer graph of the monitored aux-in using the ratshack microphone.

I sit in the car wearing earplugs and fiddle with the EQ settings as it does this. That way, I choose how to flatten it, but the player has all the features which allow me to do this without dragging the RTA gear out to the car.

Since it's possible to edit the player's EQ by just the numbers along the top of the screen, the third-octave graph could continuously overlay the bottom 3/4 of the screen and not really have much of an ill effect on my ability to tweak the EQ.

I cannot express the depth of joy I now have at not having the silly little plays counter on my track details screen. That alone has made my month.

And you can still see it in Details view, too, if you really need to see it.

I really like the 2.0 final software, it's been really stable for me in the RC stages leading up to this. I think this is a great release and I'm quite happy with it.

Thanks for the great upgrade. One question, I was wondering if the ability to turn off number of plays option (something like plays = 0) was included in this version? Also I wanted to express my gratitude for keeping the upgrades alive as long as you have.

And even though its been mentioned many times... what timing with April 1. The first place I went when I hopped on the bbs a minute ago was the "Announcements" section just to see if there were any strange announcements.

But judging from comments - I can't wait to hook up my player and install the new software!

One question, I was wondering if the ability to turn off number of plays option (something like plays = 0) was included in this version?

Why don't you try it and see? Hint: Poke around the Player Configuration dialog box...

I would but I don't have my empeg with me . It'll have to wait until tomorrow.

Or heck, they might even do [be]better, and code an ethernet-based upgrade client..

Cheers!

You know what I'd be happy to see? Something do-able without having to implement complex AI to create EQ coefficients?

IIRC: no AI required.. just some straightforward linear programming..

Cheers!

I'm loving these bug fixes! Some I've never even bothered to complain about (like when auto-sorting a list the playlists would get mixed with the tracks and how inserting a track would make the player un-pause)! Thank you, thank you!

Thanks Rob, Peter, Toby, err.. uhm.. damn.. I so dislike my memory at times..

Cheers

Any idea on Jemplode? Will it still work?

"I cannot express the depth of joy I now have at not having the silly little plays counter on my track details screen. That alone has made my month. "




How do you turn on/off the play counter?

In emplode... "Configure Player" I think.

I just noticed how 2.00 final emplode is less than 1/2 the size of Beta 13 (when zipped). Is that because of the installer?

Ah...I finally found it:

http://empeg.comms.net/php/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=empeg_tech&Number=127937&page=&view=&sb=&o=

If this works I guess we owe Roger some beer

Found it!

thanks!

Well it SHOULD be there. It may not display anything until it has calculated the BPM, which requires one complete play through of the track from start to finish.

I thought it was being calculated before, but I let the track play again, used the back button twice to go back to it, and got no BPM. I should try again now.