I Just got my Empeg...only now it's a Rio Car. I love the product but the manual sucks. I have a couple of very newby questions that I've been unable to find answers to.

1. What is the blue flashing LED mean?
2. Are all parts and accesories handled thru Sonic Blue's Rio or thru Empeg?
3. What is the current status of the radio Tuner? I seem to remeber talk of an AM/FM. Is that in the works of just FM?
4. Can some one point me to a link that has general info on the best ways to structure your MP3 database?


Thanks for you help,
Steve

the flashing led means the player is in standby.

the parts and accesories are from sonic blue if you are in the USA (which means you can't buy any right now)

the tuner is am/fm no one knows when it will be out just soon :-)

I have my collection organized /Artist/Album/Track

32Gig MK2 In 2001 VW Golf TDI

Congratulations on your new toy!

Spend some time reading through the FAQ forum on this BBS. There's more than one page's worth of messages there, make sure to look at them all. There's some messages that deal with organizing your MP3s and tags, definitely check those out.

The pulsing "standby" LED indicates that the unit is in standby mode. This means that when you press a button on the remote or the front panel, it will wake up and begin playing music instantly, without having to reboot.

Technically, when the unit goes into standby mode, it actually does the following:

- Pauses playback.
- Spins down the hard disk(s).
- Turns off the display.
- Turns off the Amplifier Remote line (to mute the amps in your car).

Otherwise, everything is running (CPU, software, and all) the same way it was when it was playing.

When you turn off the ignition in your car, it should stay in standby mode for a couple minutes before shutting off completely. The amount of time is configurable from within the Emplode software.

Some people have reported problems with their keyless entry systems when the unit is on standby while plugged into the dash. If this happens, use Emplode to reduce the standby time to five seconds or less. Then your keyless-entry problems will go away.

___________
Tony Fabris

best ways to structure your MP3 database?

That depends entirely on personal taste, and the type of music. My collection is classical, and as such is much more difficult to structure.

Far more important than how you structure your database, however, is the attention you pay to setting up your MP3 tags. I know you won't follow my advice, because just like me and everybody else who ever got an empeg, you are going to be so anxious to get your music in that you'll rush through the tagging. But save this message just so you can look at it a month from now and give yourself a dope slap and say, "Doh! He was right!

It should take you nearly as long to get your tags set up right as it does to rip and encode the music. Get the bare information from CDDB, then go in and personally edit every tag to correct the spelling and punctuation errors, and make the tags read the way you want. Check and double check that the Genre, Year, album name, artist name, is correct for each track. Put as much information as the ID3 v.1 format allows you to cram in for each track. It's a lot of extra work now... but you will be *very* happy that you did it later on. There are more than a few people on this bbs who have re-ripped their entire collections just to re-do the tags.

In a related issue... hard drive space is cheap. Don't fall into the trap of encoding at a lesser quality in order to save hard drive space.

These are things I wish somebody had beaten me about the head with when I first got my empeg. I probably wouldn't have listened... but if I were to do it all over again now I would do it differently.

tanstaafl.



"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

Tanstaafl,

As someone who may re-rip a significant portion of my CD collection, I could not agree more with your advice. it is not a huge deal, but, due to my feeling of urgency, I'm now stuck cleaning up CDDB-derived inconsistencies in things like Artist ("Yardbirds" versus 'The Yardbirds", "Richard and Linda" versus "Richard & Linda") in order to have cleaner, more usable playlists".

Yes, gobs of disk space = good. Before the next go-round of ripping, I'm going to seriously increase space on my server (Linux box with a cheap IDE RAID setup) with 3.5 inch disks -- perhaps triple what the Empeg can presently hold. I figure as 2.5 inch prices follow, I'll be able to expand storage on the Empeg and move a greater proportion of my stuff onto the Empeg, including stuff like classical that I haven't even bothered ripping yet due to length/size..

FYI, for anybody using a Grip/DDJ (Digital DJ) setup on Linux, I can say that I was able to correct some of the Artist/Album/Playlist inconsistencies in DDJ's MySQL database by installing and using a DB editor called MyPHPAdmin. It's just a basic DB admin tool and requires some sense of relational DB structure/indexing, but it did the job. Now what I need to do is figure out how to extend the DDJ DB to synch/create an Empeg playlist DB.

Jim

Now what I need to do is figure out how to extend the DDJ DB to synch/create an Empeg playlist DB

If you have decyphered the structure of MySQL database (and it cannot be too complicated), writing a Perl, tcl or Python script that reads the DB and writes an emptool script should be difficult...

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

"If you have decyphered the structure of MySQL database (and it cannot be too complicated), writing a Perl, tcl or Python script that reads the DB and writes an emptool script should be difficult..."

Yes, you can see the whole database structure through the PHP admin tool, it is pretty simple, and I am thinking of a perl script to do what you say. However, it looks like the DDJ DB (or at least the front end to it) is not set up to support creation of many-to-one playlist-to-song relationships so, for now, Emplode allows creation of more flexible playlists. Not sure that this is set in stone, and I guess I could try to create a different front end to MySQL instead of DDJ while letting Grip continue to add titles to the DB. Grip and DDJ are still actively supported by their author, Mike Oliphant. As summer wanes (and I get more interested in potential winter projects) I should probably e-mail Mike with a descripotion of what I'd like to do to see if there's any possible convergence with his plans. Ideally, it'd be great to have the same playlists on both systems (that'd also be a way of always having a playlist backup) and it'd be quite cool to be able to add a song/album to playlists (beyond artist) right at the time you rip/encode.

Jim

jim

I'm also having trouble getting the repeat to work. When I press #7 on the remote, nothing happens. Is it supposed to repeat the currently playing song or entire playlist? Sorry if this has been discussed, I searched and didn't find anything.

Thanks for your help,
Steve

That feature won't be implemented until 2.0. Sorry!

___________
Tony Fabris

I'm sorry, I just cracked up when I saw the subject of the thread, then saw this post. I mean, you might as well be speaking Klingonese to me.

___________
Tony Fabris

Yeah I thought it got into power user territory pretty quick!

Murray 06000047
I don't think, therefore I am not.