But surely you have to take your eyes off the road to examine your printed list.

Or are you saying that your friends can look at the list and then tell you which number to type in?

That could work. Here, I do find it much easier to have a printed list of the tunes, for passengers to browse and select from, than trying to explain the software interface to them.

Think of the printout as a multi-thousand line external display for the empeg, compared with the single-line display used by the playlist programmer in the software. And the external display is much more readable in bright light, too.

EDIT: The empeg software interface is really good when one *knows* what they want to listen to. But it's not great for browsing the collection to "find something suitable".

That's a difficult thing to crack on any small display.

Cheers

If I'm understanding your goal correctly, I don't think that would help at all. I think you're placing too much faith in the ability of the FID order to be anything other than random. I think a better bet is to get all the songs and playlists into the player any way you can, then put your CSV into Excel and do some processing on the list so that it prints out in the order you want it to.

Completely agreed. I find I do just the same thing even at home.

Peter

Having album art on the new Slim Squeezebox Controller screen really helps with browsability (that and being able to see 4 album titles + covers at a time).

I can understand having a list. My question was along the lines of how it helped to not look away from the road.

yep... it's the friends the list is intended for

i can enter the fid number with no problem once i have done it a few times

that is another problem, when i import in to excel the list is sorted ok, but then 2/3 down i have a big bunch of playlist FID's that i don't know where to put

i think i will post the CSV here tomorrow so you can see what i meen

The attachement contains a couple of programs that I quickly hacked together. You'll need .NET 2.0 (or probably Mono, but I've not tested that, yet).

They're not integrated yet, but I'll sort that out if there's enough interest.

They are all console applications, as follows:

• FindEmpeg, which looks for empegs on the local network. Stop it by pressing Ctrl+C.
• EmpegGet, which given the IP address found above, downloads the database files to the local directory. It assumes that you've got Hijack installed, and that the FTP server is enabled.
• EmpegDump loads the database files from above and displays the empeg database in depth-first order. Currently it's in text format, but I'm investigating HTML or XPS output formats.

Let me know how you get on.

Oh yeah, and they've had about 4 hours total development effort, so they're a little rough around the edges. Feedback is welcomed.

Is something stopping you from sleeping at the moment

thanks roger...

how is the syntax for running the programs? i will have a look at it within the next 2 days

See the empeg-tools page on my website.

sorry for answering now... have not been here for quite some time due to personal problems...

running the empeg-get gives me these error.. sorry they are in danish:

Ikke-afviklet undtagelse: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Filen 'C:\Documents a
nd Settings\-bo-\Skrivebord\empeg-tools_1\tags' blev ikke fundet.
Filnavn: 'C:\Documents and Settings\-bo-\Skrivebord\empeg-tools_1\tags'
ved System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
ved System.IO.FileStream.Init(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access,
Int32 rights, Boolean useRights, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, FileOptions
options, SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES secAttrs, String msgPath, Boolean bFromProxy)
ved System.IO.FileStream..ctor(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access,
FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, FileOptions options)
ved System.IO.StreamReader..ctor(String path, Encoding encoding, Boolean dete
ctEncodingFromByteOrderMarks, Int32 bufferSize)
ved System.IO.StreamReader..ctor(String path, Encoding encoding)
ved EmpegDump.EmpegDatabase..ctor()
ved EmpegDump.Program.Main()

could it be that some future version of hijack would have a playlist for printing (via webinterface) with each playlist grouped something like this? of course the FID numbers have to be there... it's a no rush thing for me.. but would be very nice to have

album 1
----------
tune 1
tune 2
...
...

album 2
---------
tune 1
tune 2
....
....

You could export a CSV file of everything in your empeg using Emplode. Somebody made a Word document + associated macro that reformatted it into a more human readable format. As for where that file is now...

You're asking for a lot of features to be built into the kernel itself. You can't jettison this code and you basically lose whatever memory that code took up.

well i'm not an expert in programming... just got a lot of ideas...

btw... that word thing... would that work in openoffice too? cant wait to get my hands on it

found the word thing:

http://www.riocar.org/download.php?op=getit&lid=54

but the link is dead... and it is not clear if the FID number are on the output

The BBS site name (empeg.comms.net) has changed since that link was created. Here's the empegbbs.com version of the link.

Cheers

thanks... but when i try to run the macros in openwriter nothing happens...

there are 3 macros... which one should i use?

Did you run EmpegGet before running EmpegDump? Did it create the 'tags', 'database3' and 'playlist' files?

yah i did, but it gave me errors (look a few posts up)

now, i'm trying to use the word doc, just to test it out.. but in openwriter nothing happens when i run macros

That error came from EmpegDump, not EmpegGet.

yeah, i made an mistake... but still get a error at the end

00007290: U2 - The Best Of 1990-2000 & B-Sides
000072a0: Even Better Than The Real Thing
000072b0: Mysterious Ways
000072c0: Beautiful Day
000072d0: Electrical Storm (William Orbit Mix)
000072e0: One
000072f0: Miss Sarajevo
00007300: Stay (Faraway, So Close!)
00007310: Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of
00007320: Gone (New Mix)
00007330: Until The End Of The World
00007340: The Hands That Built America (Theme From 'Gangs Of New York')
00007350: Discothèque (New Mix)
00007360: Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me
00007370: Staring At The Sun (New Mix)
00007380: Numb (New Mix)
00007390: The First Time

Ikke-afviklet undtagelse: System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException: Den g
ivne nøgle var ikke til stede i ordbogen.
ved System.ThrowHelper.ThrowKeyNotFoundException()
ved System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.get_Item(TKey key)
ved EmpegDump.PlaylistChildEnumerator.get_Current()
ved EmpegDump.Program.Visit(Int32 indent, Entry entry)
ved EmpegDump.Program.Main()

C:\Documents and Settings\-bo-\Skrivebord\5594>

but other than that it runs very fast... only missing some kind of file output.. a .txt file should do

and maybe to get the FID numbers in normal "monkey" numbers

Your database appears to be slightly corrupted -- one of your playlists references a FID that doesn't exist. If you connect to your player with emplode, it'll fix it, but you'll need to press the Sync button.

I'll look at making the program a bit more robust, but I'm going snowboarding in the morning, so you'll have to be patient.



Redirect the output: EmpegDump > file.txt



I'll fix this when I do the other changes.

At the moment, it was more just a proof-of-concept. I'll look at adding other output formats as well.

Allready did that just before retrying the dumb/get routine




No rush... just dont fall of the board and break bones :-)




Thanks... the textfile is nice... how do i check if all is there? the error might happen just as things are done




thanks a lot man...




I guess most would do with txt... but of course a html version could be nice

I'll probably generate XML and provide an example XSL transform to turn it into HTML...

keep an option for txt... but an layout for the xml/html could be

fid - album title1

fid - track title1
fid - track title2

fid - album title2

here is what i had in mind for bringing in the car... then i would take the org. rio remote and program one of the buttons to jump direct to fid entry.. then the ones i have besides me simply graps the list and find the fid number and punch that on the remote.

far more safe than haveing me to look at the display or remote to get the tune they want

So the serial interface does:
#fid REPLACE
#fid- ENQUEUE
#fid+ APPEND
#fid! INSERT

and this patch does:
+ hijack_serial_rx_insert("#", 1, 1);
+ hijack_serial_rx_insert(fidx, d+1, 1);
+ hijack_serial_rx_insert("\n", 1, 1);

after filling fidx via either button presses or knob usage. while i think it would be more useful to directly be able to choose a mode, i can't think of a way to do that, whereas presumably the select mode button could be hijacked to change modes, with a default of replace if no press. if this sounds reasonable, would you accept a patch? i'm going to have to rebuild my toolchain as my last powerpc mac went to a new home shortly ago when that person's previous machine (a G3) started kernel panicing randomly every few days.