You put the developer image on the way you always do, same way you applied the builder image... double-click on the ".upgrade" file and follow the instructions.

Make sure you've left the serial terminal session running during the stress test, and check its scrollback for errors when you get back from lunch.

i was confused about the upgrade because of the wording in the instructions "with the new drive plugged in, install the developer image" but now i see that it means plugged into the IDE connector, since it's a dual drive configuration in the example. I put on the upgrade and the system is now clean. Any recommendations before I throw a few songs on it and give it a shot?

I put 3 albums on there and was able to zip through all of them with no problems. I'll put on 10 or so albums at a time, testing at each point, and see how it goes...

oh, and the stress test did not report any errors.

I put half on and it's failing again, now i'll remove half that, etc. as you've suggested. one thing is, i'm moving these files over a good fast ethernet connection, any idea why i'm only getting 400k/sec?

you're not going to believe this, but i figured it out. it has nothing to do with any of my songs.

it's the Favorite Visual setting for DSP! As soon as I add a visual to the DSP setting, it starts failing. i remove it, it works again. i add them to fm, am, aux, and it works. add one to dsp it fails, remove it and it works. over and over again, this is repeatable.

in thinking back, i only changed that setting based on trying to fix what i didn't like about emphatic (remember, i'm the guy that wrote that long list of questions a couple of weeks ago).

so that's it, the Favorite Visual setting for DSP causes the unit to hang frequently.

any suggestion other than to not use it? i don't mind not using it.

Wait, that doesn't make any sense.

What software version are you running?

The "Lavatory Floor" visual guarantees crashing in the v3alphas.

Right, which is why I was asking the version number.

I mean, if we just went through this entire exercise because he was running alpha software, I would be extremely upset.

You don't just haul off and say "my system is crashing" when you're running alpha or beta software. You try the known-stable final release software first.

2.00 final both before and after the rebuilding of the drive. i've never used the alpha code but did use a number of the v2 beta code a couple of years ago.

Hm. Okay, one last question, then.

Do you have this problem?

PS: If you'd had this problem, it should have disappeared after you formatted the hard disk. The only way it would have come back is if you'd copied the config.ini off and tried to put it back again. Doing so would have been deviating from the test procedures we discussed above. If you're going to do that sort of thing when someone is giving you tech support, you really need to tell them about it.

No, I don't believe I have that issue. I'm currently in the middle of a 6 hour synchronize operation, so i can't check out the config.ini file right now, but I definitely didn't touch the config.ini file after the reformat.

And I can sympathize with your concern about me changing things along the way. I've been a professional hardware and software troubleshooter for the past 8 years, starting with building and repairing custom PCs in the mid 90s, then to high end storage (fibre channel disk arrays), and quite a bit of networking and home theater installing in between. I am currently doing level 3 tech support for EMC storage products at Dell and spend most of my day walking people through processes to fix their systems. I think I have sound troubleshooting methodologies and understand very well the need to follow a script. In this case, I'm only interested in making it work, by any means necessary. I had actually put 30 or 40 albums on and it was working, then I went and changed player options in emplode, and started putting more albums on it. When I tried it again, it was suddenly failing, and i made the false assumption that it was the new music. After the music came off, and it still failed, I began to suspect the player options.

I'm guessing there's some process in the background related to the visuals, even if you aren't using any, so that every time you change songs, it's changing visuals (or refreshing the visual). is there some way to completely delete all visuals? i've never found any use for bright flashing lights visible out of the corner of my eye while i'm driving...

Thanks for all your help and i would appreciate it if someone could try to reproduce the issue. I'll report back when all my data is copied back over and I get the chance to test it.

Okay, cool, just checking. Because with software version 2.0, the only previously known issue with Favorite Visuals is the one I linked.

As far as I know, there's no way to simply delete all visuals. But I also don't think there's any processing going on in the background for the visuals if you select "none" for the visual or if your on a text info screen. So you shouldn't need to worry about that.

This is very odd that the favorite visuals feature would be what crashes the player. Perhaps we could see exactly what was in your favorites list when the crash happens? Maybe it's something specific that we could reproduce on our players too.

I put 'off' in the DSP favorites list. the others were blank.

oh, and the easy way to reproduce for me is to play all songs (down, down, down), then hit next track. i'm not sure what visual was actually active at that point, but the Info was set to 'track' so i never saw it anyway. also, i don't have the remote, so i definitely haen't even applied the 'favorite visuals' mode setting. so i don't see why it would even matter what favorites were in my list.

I'm going to leave the empeg at work overnight to finish syncing up, and if you want me to try anything tomorrow, just let me know.

On a separate note, shouldn't i be getting emails on replies? i verified my email address in my profile but don't remember choosing to get (or not to get) emails on replies.

Darn. Can't reproduce it with the same favorites list as you. Sigh. I was hoping we'd just found a new bug or something.

Well, anyhoo, you now know that:

- The favorites list as you've configured it, is what causes the problem for you.

- There's no need to configure a favorites list at all, you only need to set it to info:track or visual:off or whatever. So you can work around the bug.

So it means your problem is solved, even if we don't know why.

Regarding emails, I dunno how that works on the BBS, I've never used that feature.

I finished putting all 4500 songs back on and everything worked fine. I added the 'off' visual back and it crashed, so i removed it and it worked again.

here's where it gets ugly. I manually changed the visual to 'off' and it froze. i powered it off and back on, and it hangs as soon as "Source: Player" appears on the screen, without even getting to the point where it's going to play a track (It says Plays=0 and [-/-] at the bottom.

so this means i can't change the visual! is there a way to break into the serial port and change the visual, or am i going to have to rebuild the image again?? agh!



You have to add a particular thread to your favourites if you want email responses. By default, this doesn't happen, AFAIK.


I did add this thread to my favorites and i'm not getting notified. i checked my spam folder and there's nothing there. so either austin road runner is blocking it, or the function is broken.

Greetings!

Boot with the serial connection set up. As soon as it starts to load the player, hit control-c. This will kill the player. Then run it from command line with "player -i". This should start the player with no playlist in place. I am not sure if it will work or not (not a bad file, but a bad visual), but it is worth a try.

Are you running any versions of hijack along with your 2.0? Just curious.

awesome, thanks! that did it.

no, i haven't put hijack back on yet after the rebuild, but i'm going to do that now.

I just went back to narrow down this problem, and here's what i've found:

i added every single visual to my favorites INCLUDING 'off' then it worked.

removed everything BUT 'off' then it still works.

removed 'off' it still works.

added back 'off' as the only favorite and after a mysterious media scan, it still works.


so at this point, everything works - including 'off' both selected manually or added to the visual favorites list. the ONLY thing i've done since it was failing is to run 'player -i'...is there any chance this could have 'fixed' something??

Hmmm... I have never seen OFF before used in conjunction with favorite visuals. I wonder...

The player -i starts the player application without any startup information (current playlist, settings, info / visual screens). I cannot think of anything it would fix that would survive a rebuild, though, unless there was something really wacky in your scratch or dynamic data partitions.