Hey, many thanks to the guys at the NY meet for upgrading me to 2.0final and HiJack (cwillenbrock and JeepBastard (right?)). However, I'm having a huge problem with the menu system. I know I should read the FAQ and look on the BBS, but I'm basically in panic over this.

The first symptom in a sentence:
When I enter a menu, it shows me a random item rather than the one that's currently selected.

The second symptom in a sentence:
In the menus, the order of the items is different each time I go into the menu.

The question in a sentence:
Is this the design of all 2.0 versions, just 2.0final, or a result of HiJack?

The symptoms in more than a sentence:
Let's take the Info menu for example:
In 1.03, if ya'll can think back that far, the items in the Info menu were Off, Line, Track, Now&Next, in that order. When I was currently viewing in Line mode, going into the Info menu would show Line selected. Also, with Line selected, the item to the left was Off and the item to the right was Track. So, if I wanted to change from Track to Now&Next, I'd enter the Info menu, press Right twice, and press Down to select. The items were always in the same order and the item which was currently selected was displayed upon entering the menu.

Now with 2.0final and HiJack, the Info menu shows the first symptom. If I'm viewing in Line mode and I enter the Info menu, it has Now&Next selected. Then, if I select Now & Next, when I enter the Info menu, it has Transient selected. Why is this?

The Shuffle menu shows both the symptoms. If I have Off selected, when I enter the Shuffle menu, the previously used shuffle mode is selected; let's say that's By Year. The order of the items is:
By year, Newest additions, Off, Random, Least often played, Least recently played

Ok, so I'll select By Year. Now, when I go back into the Shuffle menu, Off is selected. BUT, now the order of the items is:
Off, By year, Newest additions, Random, Least often played, Least recently played
So, when I go into the Shuffle menu, Off is selected and has been removed from its place between "Newest additions" and "Random" and is now to the left of the currently selected item "By year."

I see the logic for Shuffle: "Off is always selected so you can always switch it off" AND "The currently selected mode is to the right of Off." But that's not consistent with Info, which doesn't move items around but, each current Info state has it's corresponding unrelated state which is shown upon entering the Info menu.
(ie:
Off gives you Line,
Seek gives you Track (which is next to it, so that makes sense),
Track gives you Seek,
Transient gives you Off,
Line gives you Now&Next,
Now&Next gives you Transient)

Then, the Repeat menu always shows Off when it's selected, which is fine because the little r down by the track number in Track mode means Repeat All and the big R means Repeat One. But I can't tell that from Line mode and I have a hell of a time getting BACK to Track mode because going into the Info menu dumps me at Now&Next

More stuff in more than one sentence:
Now, I was able to figure all that logic out on the hour ride home from the meet. I WASN'T able to even start with the Visuals menus. All I know is, I was viewing Scope and entering the Visuals menu (by type), then Soundplot, Anna Vu was selected. Selecting Anna Vu and reentering the Visuals menu (by type) and Soundplot menu, I was shown Oscilloscope Persist. Ok, so the order of the menu is staying the same, but it's still selecting a random item when I reenter the menu.

Then I won't even ask what is the function of holding the Down button at the playing view because I can just look that up in the documentation (though I'd have to look up where to find the documentation). All I know is it doesn't turn Info on and off and it doesn't go to the previous Info mode, so I don't know. And though I love the new Equalizer menu, I'm bummed that it's placed as the third right item in the Sound menu, which, itself, was demoted to third left item in the main menu instead of first left item. For me, EQ is the most important Sound item and it was very useful to have it as the selected as soon as I entered Sound.

But I will ask if there's a way to keep Line mode from squishing the visual. It seems to make the visuals (Scope and Soundflag, I noticed) run slower and jitter a bit. And, while it's cool, I can't bear to think that the beautiful Soundflag (or any of them) are getting distorted from their original perfection.

Ok, rant over. Guess you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

First things first. None of this stuff has anything to do with Hijack. The menu order of the player software is not controlled by hijack.

I see the logic for Shuffle: "Off is always selected so you can always switch it off"

Not exactly. Off is the default selection if one of the shuffle modes is activated. If shuffle is off, and you select the Shuffle menu, it shows you the last shuffle mode. Reason: FAQ entry here.

Interesting point about how the positioning of the items themselves within the menu seems to change around a bit. Not sure why that is. Never bothered me...

but that's not consistent with Info

Insert Walt Whitman quote here.

In any case, I don't think the behavior of the menus has changed between 2.0 beta 13 and 2.0 final. Didn't you notice this happening in beta 13? Why wait until now to complain? They even did a "last call for beta 13 bugs" shortly before their last pizza session.

If I'm viewing in Line mode and I enter the Info menu, it has Now&Next selected. Then, if I select Now & Next, when I enter the Info menu, it has Transient selected. Why is this?

I'd guess because it allows you to cycle through the info modes easily, from the front panel, without using the remote control.

Then I won't even ask what is the function of holding the Down button at the playing view because I can just look that up in the documentation (though I'd have to look up where to find the documentation). All I know is it doesn't turn Info on and off and it doesn't go to the previous Info mode, so I don't know.

Holding the Down button toggles between the last screen which showed some kind of visual (such as Line, Transient, or Off), and the last screen which showed no visuals (such as Now-Next or Track). Tends to work best after you've explicitly selected those modes from the main menu as opposed to cycling through them with the info button.

But I will ask if there's a way to keep Line mode from squishing the visual.

Once upon a time, Line mode did not squish the visual, it covered the bottom of the visual instead of squishing it. A bunch of people complained and begged for the current behavior to be implemented instead. I've said it before: Be careful what you wish for, people.

But I will ask if there's a way to keep Line mode from squishing the visual.

Use transient. Then it only squishes for a few seconds each track before gracefully disappearing. Hitting 'Select Mode' on the remote will pull the line back up again should you need to.

Tony,

Thanks for the FAQ citation and all the explanations.

No, I don't think I noticed this in 2.0b13. But then again, I only used b13 for about 2 hours before returning to 1.03, which I've been using for 6 months.

If there IS logic to which item shows as selected vs. which item really is selected, I'd love to know because then I'd learn it and get on with it. But until then, haha, I'll just have my eyes off the road more trying to make the simple switch from Scope to Soundflag or trying to switch from Line to Track.

Oh, and genexia, Transient mode rocks. But, is there a way to pop the track name back on the screen while listening to the track? Like, pause/unpause? No, I haven't read the documentation yet, so I don't know.

>But, is there a way to pop the track name back on the screen while listening to the track?

Yeah, just hit SelectMode on the remote, or from the Hijack "short knob press" popup-menu.

Cheers

ALL our menus have DIFFERENT bugs in, and NOBODY noticed!

For whatever it's worth, the intended behaviour for the Shuffle menu is that if shuffle were on when you went into the menu, the item you'd see first would be Off. If shuffle were off when you went into the menu, the item you'd see first would be the most recent form of shuffle you'd used. This makes it easiest to toggle Shuffle on and off. Under no circumstances should the relative positions of the items change. But a quick look at the code for 2.0final shows that this just isn't what the code does

The behaviour for Visuals should probably be to show you the current one first (unlike Shuffle, most use of the visuals menu is not just to turn visuals on or off). For Repeat and Info (Info is just another kind of visual, as far as the menus are concerned) what to do is less clear cut -- any offers? I'm inclined to make Repeat work like Shuffle, and Info work like Visuals.

This would all get fixed in a 2.01 release, if/when we do one.

Peter

ALL our menus have DIFFERENT bugs in, and NOBODY noticed!

hmm, sounds like you need some fresh blood on the alpha team.

--dan.

hmm, sounds like you need some fresh blood on the alpha team.

No, sounds like Murphy's Law is still in effect: the one person here who caught this was the one not running the beta.

peter:
Thanks for the clarifications.

The toggle-centric design of the Shuffle menu you described is implemented well by moving the Off item to the right of the currently selected Shuffle state. I, personally, would rather eventually memorize the Shuffle item order and know that, say, Off was two to the right of "By year" (is it?). Perhaps Shuffle could be more toggle oriented through a HiJack button remap; ie: press-hold down toggles Info but maybe HiJack could change it to toggle Shuffle.

It would be ideal if Repeat, Info, and Visuals (and any others, including Shuffle maybe) all showed the current state when you entered the menus, as they do in 1.03. Users could learn the menus and then know how to get from the current state to the new state easily (and without looking).

mlord:
By the way, HiJack friggin rocks after just the base install. I can't wait to read up and learn what it can do.

FerretBoy:
Haha, that and maybe there's a rule about being hyper-aware to these new-fangled things when stepping out of a stone-age version. Gets me EVERY time. Just wait till I upgrade my Windows 95 to XP.

hmm, sounds like you need some fresh blood on the alpha team.

You had just as much of a chance to catch it in Beta 13 as everyone else did.

I just checked the release notes for Beta 13. July 2002. Nearly a year it's been out. I dunno if it really was public on that date or if it was a bit later than that. My point is that the entire installed base of empeg owners pounded on it for months (not just the alpha team), and no one noticed this until now.

I don't meant to sound like I'm taking offense, I'm just trying to point out a logical fallacy in the statement. The point of having an alpha team is to catch the real show-stoppers before the larger beta group gets the software. We're not supposed to catch everything, that's what public betas are for.

FireFox: Next time, don't be so shy about running the betas. Perhaps stuff like this would get caught and fixed sooner if folks like you ran betas more often.

Oh, and genexia, Transient mode rocks. But, is there a way to pop the track name back on the screen while listening to the track?

Press the Select Mode button on the remote control. But there's an even better way:

My favorite way to run the player is to have it toggle between TRACK mode and TRANSIENT mode. I leave it on Transient mode most of the time, then when I want to see song details during the middle of the song, I press and hold the bottom button on the faceplate to toggle it.

You can also use Hijack to set your knob-presses to cycle through all the info modes if you like.

hey now, i was just teasing. it wasn't meant to be a logical statement, it was meant to be a joke. that's why the wink was there.

seriously, my guess is that most of us set up the visual/info settings the way we like them, and then rarely change them. i can't remember the last time i went into the visual menus, and i wouldn't be surprised if many other users behave the same way.

--dan.

seriously, my guess is that most of us set up the visual/info settings the way we like them, and then rarely change them.

Yup. Agreed.

FireFox: Next time, don't be so shy about running the betas. Perhaps stuff like this would get caught and fixed sooner if folks like you ran betas more often

Perhaps he didn't want to use buggy versions of the software. We were always pretty careful about public beta versions, but I still suspect that a silent majority of owners have never used a beta version, and a fair minority (at least once new players shipped with 1.x) have never applied an upgrade at all...

Peter

I'd say that that's less likely for the empeg than most upgradable consumer products, as the majority of people who found the empeg at all probably found it because they were computer geeks looking for the product in the first place. It's not like it was commercially advertised anywhere.

Perhaps he didn't want to use buggy versions of the software.

I think it's a double standard to panic about bugs after the product goes final, after deliberately avoiding a ten-month chance to help locate the bugs and even offer some input into the development process. The final 2.0 software was heavily shaped by input from people on this BBS, and I think that's the coolest thing in the world. I just feel like FireFox may be trying to close the barn door after the horse has run off to the pub.

It's one thing if the betas are closed and the final product costs money. Then it's OK to panic after you buy it.

FireFox: What made you remove beta 13? It was really stable, and had so many more features than 1.03.

Tony:
Thanks for the tips on Track vs. Transient. With a little more fiddling, I confirmed what you said about "Holding the Down button toggles between the last used "visual info" (ie: Transient, Off) and the last used "full screen info" (ie: Seek Tool, Track). Phew, one panic gone. Yeah, and the Hijack Knob thing is awesome.

Tony:
I remember that 2.0b13 was better than 1.03 because I tried it for a time. But my reason for sticking with 1.03 was twofold:
One - I'd read somewhere that "It's better to do your initial upload of your MP3s using 1.03; the more stable version." So, I decided to keep with 1.03 until that was done. 6 months later, I'm only half done uploading my MP3s so....
Two - I figured I'd better tame 1.03 before jumping into 2.0b13. I tried b13 but it was so intense, that I just backed down to 1.03 to get the hang of things.

However,
>Next time, don't be so shy about running the betas. Perhaps stuff
>like this would get caught and fixed sooner

If I'd jumped to 2.0b13, I wouldn't have known 1.03 well enough to notice the changes in 2.0b13. Like, for instance, another thing that's making me panic about 2.0final is this:

The Left and Right beep sounds seem quieter than the Up and Down beep sounds.

(Yes, I tried searching the BBS for that first but, haha, using keywords "beep louder", I couldn't find much). So, if I hadn't used 1.03 so much, I wouldn't have gotten to know the 1.03 beep sounds so well that I noticed they were different in 2.0final.

Oh, and while I'm beeping about the beep tones, after entering the Equaliser menu, pressing Down to bring down the menu doesn't produce a beep. But, oh well, I'm just being neurotic.

peter:
Oh yeah, I forgot. the third reason I didn't upgrade earlier was because the beta versions were always changing so much (it seemed). I wanted to get a final version, learn it, and get really good with it. I seem to remember that the Seek Tool was being redone between every beta and I thought, "Dang, if I have to relearn the software after each beta, I'll get so confused." So, while I knew the software was stable, I just didn't want to confuse my small brain.


Tony:
>I think it's a double standard to panic about bugs after the product goes final

Yes it is and I'm sorry. I actually didn't consider the menu functionality to be a bug. I just figured that was the design. So, by starting this thread, I was inquiring about the logic behind the menu design so I could learn it and become fluent with the front panel like I was in 1.03. Yes, the horse has had a pint or two, so I'm just trying to figure out where he went rather than get him back.

djc:
>my guess is that most of us set up the visual/info settings the way we like them, and then rarely change them.

Haha, maybe I'm totally weird. I change visuals for every genre (and most sub-genres) of music on my player. Jazz = SpectroFlip128, Rock = SpectroKit128, Folk = TrippingPrisoner128, Techno = FunnelWeb or SoundFlag, Light Pop = Gamapian, Pop = Scope, etc.

I also change between like 5 different EQ settings based on genre. I also change between different Info modes based on my mood.

Basicaly, I use the front panel a TON. That's why I notice little things like the menu order. It's interesting to know how we all use the player.

>Haha, maybe I'm totally weird. I change visuals for every genre

Ahhh.. Have we got a killer feature for you, then!

First, if you haven't already, go to the Hijack KNOB menu (also works with a LONG press of "Menu" on the RioRemote), and select the "Knob Press Redefinition" item. Change the setting from "Default" to "PopUp0".

Now, a short press of the KNOB results in a Pop-Up menu of commonly needed remote functions, plus some.. such as the "VisualSeek" function. Try that one! Once selected, it uses the Knob, or next/prev track buttons, to scroll through the possible visuals. Works for "Favorite Visuals" (another v2 feature, see the FAQ), as well as "All Visuals" (toggle between them with a longpress of the Visuals button on the remote or from the Hijack short Knob Press popup).

If you like it, then map it to the remote as follows in config.ini:

[ir_translate]
visual.L=visual.L
visual=visualseek


Cheers

Mark,

Thanks for the tip. I basicaly read the whole Hijack FAQ last night so I'm going to look into the ir_translate settings. So maybe stuff like "favorite visual" and "VisualSeek" will help me overcome my panic of the 2.0 transition. Thanks again.

In reply to:

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ALL our menus have DIFFERENT bugs in, and NOBODY noticed!

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I mentioned this one - and ynot concurred.