It is live on the site. Check it out.

Ok now, who will be the first to download it and install it? ;)

Hugo

downloaded... Installing.


(edit)

HEY! What happened to my music??????


Jk...

Edited by synergy on 17/10/01 07:56 PM.

Installing ca. 25% done.

TommyE

I LOVE the wave on bootup... This looks really nice.

Thank you.

You beat me to it...

TommyE

Installed, may not have won but... :)


why must it pump so slowly.. dying...


cute it waved :)

I LOVE the wave on bootup... This looks really nice.

Thanks!

Note that I did a slightly more corporate-looking one for the Rio personality. You can switch between the two personalities with my Logo Editor (just tell it you've got a Rio player and send or delete the logo).

___________
Tony Fabris

Thank tfabris for the boot animations ;)

Hugo

The new visuals are cool too. I want my own bitmap on the panning visual....
Can this be done with the logouploader Tony??

TommyE

Also, Drakino's logo site has three new logos I put there that were derived from the animation frames I used to create the animated boot logos. I put them there in case anyone wanted their custom logos to blend with the animated logos.

For instance, my custom logo now has the new Tux sitting there next to my name and phone number. So when the animated logo is done, it seems as though the "empeg" name disappears and my name/phone appears, but Tux stays put.

___________
Tony Fabris

Now, HOW am I supposed to get my Ipsec VPN's working now?

Tony, You lied. This is worth the fuss we made.

I'm going to have to go ride about a bit.......

HEY! What happened to my music??????

The RIAA hacked into your empeg when you were looking at the new visuals, and deleted them, as they believe all MP3s are illegal...


Jk also... =)




Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

I want my own bitmap on the panning visual....
Can this be done with the logouploader Tony??

I was expecting this one.

Okay, here's the deal:

1) The animated boot logos reside in flash memory along with the custom logos and the kernel. They are RLE-compressed, but I'm not certain if the compression algorithm is finalized yet. I have some code to do the conversion, and I'm going to play with it as soon as I get a chance. I could add this functionality to the logo editor, however do not expect an onion-skinning cel animator out of the logo editor any time soon. You'll basically need to feed it a series of windows BMP files that you've created yourself and sequentially numbered.

2) The Image Pan visual is RLE-compressed and resides in a file on the empeg's hard disk. I also have some code for compressing this, but I think the version of the code I have is out of date. As I recall, Borislav also has access to this information because he was helping me look at it for a while and the empeg guys said I could show it to him. I think a couple of the other alpha team members might have access to this code as well.

I don't have any reliable code for sending a file to the empeg for the purpose of replacing that Image Pan visual. If you've got a serious urge to replace the image pan visual and you think you can get a reliable code set and UI for doing it, I'd be willing to integrate it into my Logo Edior. Any takers?

___________
Tony Fabris

Wow, looks like I'm late to the party. emplode installs fine on XP, and I'm upgrading the kernel as we speak.

-Trevor

-----
Mk 2, Green 12GB, Tuner 080000349

I'm getting "invalid file format" whenever I try to play a track. I am doing an emplode sync to see if that helps.

__
Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

Well.. it IS Beta... I've had two lockups playing with it now....

Hugo/Rob,

Is there a format you want bug reports in, and do you have a system setup to handle it?

Or, to put it another way... What can we do to help?

I got this on one track too, all others I've tried works.
The track worked earlier.

Wow, I really like Emplode now.

TommyE

I'm getting "invalid file format" whenever I try to play a track. I am doing an emplode sync to see if that helps.

Oh yeah, we forgot to tell you, you have to re-encode all your music now.

(Actually, that never happened to any of us testers. How many different tracks have you tried? Do those tracks check out fine in MP3Trim?)

___________
Tony Fabris

I've had two lockups playing with it now....

Don't SAY that!

I haven't had it lock in weeks. It's been as solid as 1.03 for a long time.

As far as reporting bugs, first check to make sure they're not in the release notes (there are some existing known bugs), then post the details in the Bug Reports forum here and see if anyone else is getting them.

Normally, you'd just send it to the bugs mailing address as usual, but I'm thinking on a big new release like this we don't want to swamp the mailboxes with duplicate reports right off the bat.


___________
Tony Fabris

The player is now much better at refusing to play invalid tracks (which could previously have caused a hang or crash).

Is there anything unusual about your tracks? We've been using this engine for almost a year with the alpha team without any significant problems (if anything more tracks played than did before). Is there anything unusual about the encoder you use?

Rob

Love the new UI. Nice and slick. It's gonna take me a while to find all the new stuff in here. I left my remote in the truck, and can't run down to get it right now...

Minor issue: clock format is always 24hr, no matter what I choose from settings.

-Trevor

-----
Mk 2, Green 12GB, Tuner 080000349

Sorry...

But I've been having them...

In specific, it appears to be directly related to the visual switching.

Playing Blue man group Mp3's, switching between the visuals using the rio remote, and boom, the interface does NOT respond.

The clock stops incrementing (system clock), but the visual is still going, emplode can not talk to the player, power off and back on to fix.

The player DOES seem to come up a bit quicker now....



(edit)
I'm trying to get a reliable reproduction now.

Edited by synergy on 17/10/01 08:44 PM.

Argh, this never happened to me, I never saw it on the Alpha bug list. ARGH.

___________
Tony Fabris

Hmm. Haven't seen syncronise problems since beta8 or something.
Now they're here to haunt me.
The come all the time.

Both serial and on USB.

TommyE

I'm getting "invalid file format" whenever I try to play a track. I am doing an emplode sync to see if that helps.

Ah, that should help. We all forgot to mention that since it has been true since alpha1 :-)

You need to use emplode to add a Codec tag to all your files so it knows what format they're in. Some old versions (probably pre-1.0 but I haven't checked) of emplode didn't put them in.


--
Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)

Yeah... the new visuals are amazing. It's a great leap up from the first set, which were pretty kick ass in and of themselves. Great work guys. Off to play!! It feels like i just got a new empeg!

update: Wow, i can really see the screen burn in now with the scrolling image visual. Never noticed it before.


|| loren.cox ||

It was every track I tried. I tried about half a dozen tracks.

Doing a sync and letting emplode fix some metadata fixed it, I think...

__
Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

I'm getting something similar. When I play tracks, I get Invalid Track Format quite a lot.
When I run emplode, it tells me it's going to fix things. It does this for a little while, but I get a lot of warnings, like " was missing metadata", then "Extracting frame info for failed - defaulting, Unsupported/Invalid MP3 format. (error 0xc0040012).
If I try to sync, I get Sync failed... Wrong session cookie (error 0x80040059). All I can do is quit :-(

Apart from that everythings great! Love the new visuals! :-)

A lot of my MP3s are VBR encoded with Xing Audio Catalyst, is this a problem?

Phil.

It feels like i just got a new empeg!

I second that emotion...though my "old" empeg never locked up before

Seriously, folks...2.0 looks very promising. Thanks for all the hard work.

- Chris
32GB MK2 090000664 Smoke
Queue # 2 (who the heck was 1?)

Nothing odd about the tracks in question, clean rips with AudioCatalyst. Allowing emplode to fix metadata problems seems to have fixed the problem.

__
Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

I had the missing meta data problem as well... I let emplode fix it, and most are now fine.

However, a few of them showed something like "unable to extract frame data".
Now I have a number of tracks without a samplerate, and a few with really wacked out durations (some ~6 minute tracks showing as 50mins long!)

Can I force emplode to check them again (Is there any point, will it return the same value anyway?)

Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

The waving "Tux" on bootup is a beautiful touch. I'm still wandering through new features and such and no problems so far. I do miss the "old style" marquesas vis, the trails are okay but it'd be nice if they were optional. Oh well.

-Tony
MkII #554

Ack! Not only have I managed to lock up the player software...I've now crashed Emplode. After doing so, it gives me a database lock error when trying to select my player when starting Emplode again. Probably be fine when I reboot the player...

Here's what I did to cause Emplode to crash (if this helps)...
I used the "By Artist" listing and selected a misspelling of a band name (I had misspelled the band's name when tagging the MP3s). I selected all the MP3s in that view, and selected Properties to fix the artist name in the empeg database. I fixed it, clicked ok, and it seemed to work for a sec, and moved all the files into the group that already had the correct spelling, and then emplode.exe crashed.


- Chris
32GB MK2 090000664 Smoke
Queue # 2 (who the heck was 1?)

That's definitely a bug.

You would have been better off simply dragging the mis-named tracks into the correctly named area. Emplode will then ask you if you want to accept a fix to the tags, and do it for you if you give it permission. Try it No effort!

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

I would have tried that, had I known that was possible. My, that's a cool little feature there to keep in mind.

Re: the original problem...I tried to do the exact same thing a second time after opening the player again, and it work without problems. Don't you love bugs that you can't reproduce?

- Chris
32GB MK2 090000664 Smoke
Queue # 2 (who the heck was 1?)

The wacky duration is often caused when the player software fails to correctly read the VBR header of the file.

The most common cause for this is the presence of ID3V2 tags. These can be a pain in the arse, as they are attach to the front of the file, and the player has to try and work out where they finish, which it doesn't always do properly.

For now, I've stuck with just ID3V1 tags, as these are placed at the end of file.

To see if this is your problem, try playing the file in MediaPlayer 8. If it can't work out the proper length of the track either, then it's very likely that the ID3V2 tag is not quite right, and hence the player can't find the VBR header which should follow it.

Hope this helps,

Andy.

In the "Troubleshooting" section of the new FAQ at Riocar.org, there is a link to a program which will correct bad VBR headers.

___________
Tony Fabris

The waving "Tux" on bootup is a beautiful touch.

Thanks!

I do miss the "old style" marquesas vis, the trails are okay but it'd be nice if they were optional.

It is. Press the Select Mode button on the Rio Remote a few times.


___________
Tony Fabris

At least half of the files with the wacky duration have been VBR "fixed" by MP3 Tag Studio, which is why I am slightly concerned...

I'll try the other tools linked when I'm next running windows...

Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

Thanks? That was your idea? Great show, old chap!

As for the select mode, awesome. 'preciate the tip.

-Tony
MkII #554

So.. has the wonderful provider of the automatic volume adjustment kernels patched one up for 2.00b3 yet?

I'm not willing to give up that feature in my car,
as otherwise I've got to adjust the knob manually about
every 30 seconds or so to keep the level audible.

It would be nice to have this magic feature only active
when in car mode, though.. I suppose I could hack that
together if no one else does.

There are at least a couple of tools for fixing bad VBR headers, including my Linux utility "mp3tool", available from http://rtr.ca/empeg

That was your idea?

Not my idea, just my animation files.

They put the code in there for animations, but didn't really have any art to put there. Rob asked me if I "knew anyone" who did animations. I suspect he wasn't really asking me for a reference...

___________
Tony Fabris

AAAGGGHHRR!!

It's here and I forgot to bring my serial cable from work!!!

Oh God this is horrible!

Murray
new styleee

I'm not willing to give up that feature in my car

On that note, I wouldn't mind the knobappend and menusort programs available for this version. I miss having my playlists of playlists displayed in the order of my choosing.

Come to think of it..it would have been cool to see that included as an optional feature of 2.0..but then there ain't nothing left of that dead horse, now...is there?

- Chris
32GB MK2 090000664 Smoke
Queue # 2 (who the heck was 1?)

I wouldn't mind the knobappend and menusort programs available for this version.

Knobappend is now built into the software. It works a little differently (better) than the hack version. Check the release notes.

___________
Tony Fabris

Knobappend is now built into the software. It works a little differently (better) than the hack version. Check the release notes

You know...I read that in the prerelease release notes, and it slipped my mind. Yeah..this works much better than the hack version.

Now about that menusort hack...

- Chris
32GB MK2 090000664 Smoke
Queue # 2 (who the heck was 1?)

I've got a couple of kernels, but I've got no way of publishing them on the web until maybe tonight (another 14 hours), or possibly the weekend.

Is there anyone who can publish something immediately? I'll mail you the stuff.

Oh, by the way, the ioctl has changed back to 2 again, so if you've using a program to change the voladj parameters with 1.03, you might need to recompile it with 2 instead of 3. I _think_ the empeg guys kindly left a gap in their ioctl numbering for this. :) Thanks guys!

Richard.

If you need a site to put up the custom kernels,
I can host them for a day/week no problem.

email 'em to me at [email protected] (no size limits).

I'll gladly host them at riocar.org. I'll e-mail you privatly about getting an admin account on the site for future use.

Richard's volume adjustment kernels for 2.00beta3 can now be downloaded from http://rtr.ca/empeg/

Not I but I did download and install.

The only word is WOW. I am going to hide away for a couple of days now and just play. One question, why are they called Wendy Filters? I haven't been keeping up with the BBS like I know I should.

Greg

One question, why are they called Wendy Filters?

Once apon a time there was a Wendy who didn't share Hugo's musical tastes. Wendy eventually left, but filters remained .

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

why are they called Wendy Filters?

Former girlfriend of Hugo's. He conceived the idea because she hated certain parts of his music collection.

I'm still waiting for the day when the player is can be notified by serial port connection of the approximate weight of the person in the passenger seat. Then it can tell the difference between my friend Tod and my wife, and activate the appropriate Wendy filter automatically.

___________
Tony Fabris

WOW WOW WOW....Kudos to everybody who worked so hard on v2. I haven't been able to put my player away for hours tonight. Thanks again all, it was well worth the wait for all of these new goodies :>

Technoweenie
12 GB Blue / Grey MK II

In reply to:

---

You need to use emplode to add a Codec tag to all your files so it knows what format they're in. Some old versions (probably pre-1.0 but I haven't checked) of emplode didn't put them in.

---

A majority of my mp3s seem to be in this state. Can I fix this globally with emptool?
Or, just manually add it to all my *1 files, and rebuild the db? Hey, I'll try that:

$ for foo in /drive[01]/fids/*1 ; do grep ^codec $foo || grep ^type=tune $foo && echo codec=mp3 >> $foo ; done

Then, rebuilt the db. Now, I can play all my mp3s. Yay.

There's probably an easier way to do this, but this way worked for me.

*thinking* That is such a good idea . . . Only problem is the g'friend is pregnant so her weight is now SIGNIFICANTLY different than it was a couple of months ago. But I am sure I could write a small shell script to handle that problem.

*seeing the input device now*
Wendy Filter -> Girlfriend
Please input Weight?
Pregnant?
How many Months?


Greg

Now, this is what I am going to miss in future car disk-based players!

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

arrrrghhhhhh, iv'e been drooling all day at work I haven't got my player here!!!.....so I'll have to wait till tonight, also bin refreshing this page every 5 secs, interesting checking out who has problems etc...
anyway while im playing with it tonight most of you will be asleep :)

Jaidev

My Sony stalk works 100% now. Yeee Haaa! Bravo. This makes my empeg 99.999% perfect. Great job everyone.

-Zeke

just say you weren't paying much attention...

Only problem is the g'friend is pregnant so her weight is now SIGNIFICANTLY different than it was a couple of months ago.

Wendy filter weight & retina scan?


This is THE software release of the decade!
I've been playing with the re-tagging functions in emplode more than anything else. If only there were tag editing SW that worked this well and this easily! (hint)

Only had one problem. During a sync I got a report that there were errors in the meta data of two files. emplode hung while fixing it but the player restarted. I had to kill off emplode and re-run it. I synced again (with no changes) & all was ok. Don't know quite what caused it.

This was sooo worth the wait. And the threats to Tony!

Murray
new styleee

Now about that menusort hack...

Good news, bad news...

The good news is that it shouldn't be hard to do it again for 2.0 - I had a quick look. The bad news is that I'm extremely busy until the end of the week and then out of the country (and away from the empeg) for another 3 weeks...

Borislav

Ohhh...man...I don't think I could handle a wait that long. Any chance of bribery or something to kick this up a few notches on your To-Do list?

Please?

Ah well...I guess that's life. If we've waited this long for 2.0, I suppose we could wait a while longer for the sort hack. Actually, I'm tempted to go back to 1.03 for the next month now. (!)

Anyone have a dual-boot config for the empeg?


- Chris
32GB MK2 090000664 Smoke
Queue # 2 (who the heck was 1?)

First, I just wanted to say great work guys! I really like the resizing of the visual during the transient and one line info modes! I also like the quicker access to the sound menus and the improved EQ interface! An amazing number of other improvements.....

Something else I noticed though that is new to me, which I didn't see in the release notes... Emplode now lets me select much longer times for stand-by after ignition off (I mean really really long).

Is that new to 2.0? Or did I just miss this in a previous update?

I used to only able to select up to a couple of minutes worth of delay, where about 10 minutes would have been nice. Now 10 minutes is no problem.... in fact Emplode lets me select up to 172,800,000 seconds of delay. If I didn't screw up the math, that's about 5.48 years!

That means that now even when I have to run into Fry's Electronics and wait through those insane lines, my EMPEG will still be in standby when I get back! (just kidding - I wouldn't make my EMPEG standby THAT long)

It syncs properly with a setting of 600 (10 min), so I guess I'll try that tomorrow in the car and see what happens. But just curious, what is the actual maximum allowable setting that the EMPEG will implement? Did it really increase, or is this an Emplode bug I will find about tomorrow when I try to test this?

And the threats to Tony!

Yeah, like I said in the post to the RioCar.org news page, you can put down the pitchforks now.

___________
Tony Fabris

Thanks for that interim hosting, mlord. You can now also find the kernel patch and precompiled kernels for mk1 and mk2 players in the downloads section of www.riocar.org.

Richard.

In reply to:

---

Yeah, like I said in the post to the RioCar.org news page, you can put down the pitchforks now.

---

But what am I going to do with all of this squid?

Even I can't eat THIS much sushi.

Regarding the VOLADJ kernel. Is there a way to diable the VOLADJ when using the player on AC power. Although I like the compression when I use it in my vehicle, it would be nice not to have it when hooked up to my home system.

I know I could just reinstall the production kernel when using it on my home system, but this would become quite a pain to do all the time.

RE: disabling voladj when not in car:

This should be easy to do in the kernel patch, since the code could simply check for in-car/not-in-car and not activate unless in-car.

How about it Richard?

Don't do that by default. I actually like it being on at home. When I'm at work, I usually leave the player running all day through my PC speakers. It's at a low volume so as not to disturb the rest of the office. Voladj really REALLY helps keep the music audible while still allowing me to listen at low volume.

___________
Tony Fabris

You can write a little program to call the EMPEG_DSP_VOLADJ ioctl on /dev/dsp. Frank has already done this. If you wanted, you could write a little custom init script which first checks /proc/empeg_power, and then calls the ioctl with the appropriate numbers.

e.g.
Assuming you have Frank's program installed in /drive0/var

if grep "AC Power" < /proc/empeg_power > /dev/null ; then
/drive0/var/voladj 131072 0 65536 30 80
fi

Personally, I'm not going to change my patch to have this behaviour by default, because I (like tfabris) use my player at work, and it's good to have it just humming along at low volume. :)

Richard.

I installed the new update, after removing the old emplode, but I'm getting BSOD's now.. I thought I saw tony say something about a DLL that was causing problems.. I wonder If I missed it. I'll keep searching for tony's post.. arg.



12gig red mk2 -- 080000125

My latest VolAdj kernels, with included BreakOut game, now have front panel on/off control of VolAdj, and the setting is persistent across power cycles car/home.

ok.. i havn't used my windows install in a couple months.. I guess it got a little rotten. I started getting other BSOD's for VXD's that shouldn't have anything to do with emplode.

I re-installed windows (it's been 6 months, long overdue) and now everything is fine. :)


12gig red mk2 -- 080000125