That is correct, The car player will not play copy-protected WMA files.

I'm not sure how to tell if the file is protected or not, but have you tried "file/properties" in Media Player?

Another thing to try. If you can, try sending it to the player with Emplode instead of Jemplode.

If Emplode sends the file and it works, or if emplode refuses to send the file in the first place because it's protected, perhaps it's just a bug in Jemplode.

Personally, I would like to see both products (emplode and jemplode) give you a warning on bad files, but still somehow give you the option of sending the file anyway. For instance, in case I didn't have Hijack on the player and wanted to send a zipfile to the player for taxi purposes.

jEmplode does not currently parse WMA files ... I don't know the impact of not having all the tags set properly on import (i.e. will the Empeg still play a WMA whose tags are not initialized properly). Currently jEmplode doesn't care if you drop random files on your Empeg (i.e. non MP3 files). I think it will just leave them alone.

I ran emplode at home and it popped up saying that some songs had been uploaded with an older version of the software would I like to fix it -yes.


Uploaded 6 new albums.


Quit.


Ran emplode again. Downloaded the offending track (monday.wma). Got the file (now monday.wma.wma on the PC). Clicked on it and MediaJukebox started playing it. Found Windows Media Player and that worked fine too.


Renamed it to test.wma.

Ran emplode. Uploaded file. Went to play it and now it had the tag from the Media Player "The Steve Dahl Show" instead of just the filename in the playlist. It plays fine.


Went to report results here and decided to check the original version (monday.wma) and that plays fine now too.
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I would just use empeg, but it won't install w/o admin access on the NT 4 SP6 machines we use at work - but jemplode works fine.

s/w: empeg 2b11, jemplode 2b11, RioCar 2b11 consumer

I'm a little confused -- Are you talking about a jEmplode test or an emplode test? should I replace the word "emplode" with "jemplode" in your post?

Mike

I originally uploaded the WMA file at work with JEmplode (I can't install EMPLODE there) and the file showed up as invalid format when I tried to play it. I ran Emplode at home (on W95) and it apparently fixed the file format problem (and loaded the WMA meta data when I made the RioCar/PC/RioCar roundtrip). The last comment, under the ---, was that JEmplode runs well at work, but I can't install/run Emplode - Lite whining that Emplode requires admin privleges to install, JEmplode doesn't handle WMA files well yet, and most importantly - they went to a much more secure admin password scheme for our NT boxes at work.

Yeah -- I don't have any of the code to parse bitrate, etc. out of a WMA file ... It's in emptool, I just haven't ported it yet. Honestyl there hasn't been a whole lot of people who have asked about WMA, but I'll queue it up to do. Mike

I just put in WMA support tonight -- grab the latest prerelease jar at http://www.jempeg.org and try it out ... See if it fixes the problems you were seeing before.

Mike

Bingo. JEmplode uploads the file and with the WMA meta data.

You guys sure know how to get things fixed quickly around here.



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BTW the files sound somewhat better on the PC. There is a bunch of digital artifacts from the low bitrate ("Fixed rate Stereo 32kbits/s" per empeg info screen) and on the PC they seem to be filtered somewhat and come out sort of high & squeaky on the empeg.

I can tweak the EQ settings until good playback of AM quality WMA files is made a priority.

Cool ... I'm afraid the sound quality issue is not my department ... We'll have to leave that one to the Empeg guys. ms

BTW the files sound somewhat better on the PC. There is a bunch of digital artifacts from the low bitrate ("Fixed rate Stereo 32kbits/s" per empeg info screen) and on the PC they seem to be filtered somewhat and come out sort of high & squeaky on the empeg.

Based on your description, I'm betting the WMA files where you're complaining about the audio quality are not CD rips, they are something else, perhaps sound bites downloaded from the web. Right?

If your WMA files are not 44.1khz 16-bit stereo (in other words, they are some kind of lower-sample-rate web sound byte instead of actual CD rips), then I would expect that your sound quality problems are due to the sample rate conversion algorithm not being optimized for that rate.

There is a whole complicated science to sample rate conversion. It's a lot like image scaling/resizing in a graphics application: Some do it better than others.

Imagine that your 11khz audio file were a bitmap image. Say, for example, it was a small 320x200 graphic.

If you resize a tiny 320x200 graphic to fill a high resolution monitor, say, 1152x864, you will get blocky jagged edges on the image, right? Unless you did some kind of bilinear resampling of the image, then it wouldn't have jaggies but it would be blurry.

Well, sampling an 11khz 8-bit mono audio file up to 44.1khz 16-bit stereo is very much the same thing. High frequency artifacts in an audio file are like the jaggies in that image. And a lowpass filter on an audio file is like the blurring feature in an image editor.

So. Your windows WMA-player applet is probably doing a better job of samplerate conversion than the empeg car player because it's designed to play crappy little soundbytes and it's already tweaked to hide the "jaggies" in the upconversion to your soundcard. The empeg-car player, on the other hand, was meant to play nothing but CD rips from the get-go, and they probably didn't bother with a fancy samplerate converter algorithm, figuring that no one would want to play web soundbites on their high-quality car player.

Oh I understand, just thought I would pass it on.

It actually works pretty well, and with EQ adjustment it sounds OK.

I did find that the right button (FFWD) seems to be sluggish at times. Slow to start FFWDing, sometimes continuing on after letting go. Also after about 100 min the sounds samples disapear when FFWDing (it is silent instead of the choppy sounds sample you usually get).

There are some known problems with low-bitrate WMA files, too. I think FF/RW is one of them. I think that's even in the release notes.