Hello everyone,

I'm a new empeg owner after lusting after one since the Mk.1 days. It is amazing. I'm an engineer and have been around computers and software for 20 years and I am incredibly impressed with the design and the elegant integration of the software/hardware components. Beautiful.

My problem is that after 3 days I've become spoiled and need to figure out what to do for a "home" mp3 solution.

Currently, I am using a i386 linux machine with two 160GB IDE drives and software raid0. The machine is a P133 and I'm using "mp3blaster" to play files to avoid running X.

Even before the empeg, the limits of file system organization of mp3s was becoming a problem. Symbolic links just don't cut it. My collection (approximately 2100 CDs) is encoded with 256kb/sec Fraunhoffer and organized into Artist/Album/Track-Title.mp3 which makes loading into the empeg simple.

I don't want to go back to mp3blaster after using the empeg. I want to use the empeg software (2.0b11 is wonderful) on my entire collection. Several possibilities occur to me:

1. Can the empeg be easily modifed to access an NFS file system when "at home" so that it has access to the entire song library? I imagine this would require two databases: NFS directory available and not...

2. Has the empeg player software been ported to i386 so that I can install similar software on my Pentium "library" machine?

3. Can the empeg be opened up and connected to 3.5" IDE drives so that I can get enough disk space? Would 48bit LBA be an issue? Will this ultimately be an issue when laptop drives exceed 136GB (or whatever the magic number is)?

4. Multiple empeg machines, but this is not really practical, as 3 would be required, each with 2x60GB drives. I would like to avoid this "solution".

My favorite is a port of the fantastic player software to i386. Unfortunately, I doubt that I have the skills to pull that off within a decade.

What is the rest of the group doing for a dedicated large-library mp3 player????

Thanks in advance,

Jim (who read the faq and didn't see any clues :^) )

I think you're the first person who has said that they prefer the empeg player software over a piece of PC software.

I mean, not to put the empeg player software down or anything, but it's meant for a very limited input interface on a small screen in a car. For that situation and environment, it's the best available, hands down. But for in the home, the larger screen and mouse interface available on desktop PC's can do so much more.

You've got an interesting set of requirements for your home player, the massive storage being the trickiest. But have you looked at the Rio HSX-109? It's designed by the same people who did the empeg-car, and the software is very similar. It can only fit a single IDE hard disk, though, how big do they make IDE drives these days?

And to answer your specific questions:

Can the empeg be easily modifed to access an NFS file system when "at home" so that it has access to the entire song library? I imagine this would require two databases: NFS directory available and not...

I don't believe there is support for this in the player software at all. There's a lot of hard-coding in the player software to only access the local drives for its playback. It's got a lot of code involved in the caching algorithm, and it has to control drive spinup and spindown, for example.

Has the empeg player software been ported to i386 so that I can install similar software on my Pentium "library" machine?

No, and it's not open-source so there's not a lot of likelihood that'll happen.

Can the empeg be opened up and connected to 3.5" IDE drives so that I can get enough disk space?

Well, that's an interesting question. The player's power supply won't support desktop drives, and they won't fit in the case. But if you were choosing to build a home player using the guts of an extra car player, and you supplied your own power to the drives... hmmmmmm.... Don't know about that one, no one has ever tried. I'm really curious to know what Hugo has to say about this one.

Would 48bit LBA be an issue? Will this ultimately be an issue when laptop drives exceed 136GB (or whatever the magic number is)?

Yes, that will be an issue. At the moment, you can only get up to about 128gb per drive because the player's kernel is an older Linux version and doesn't support drives bigger than that. However, we happen to have in our community the guy who wrote the Linux IDE drivers (Mark Lord), so if anybody can code a work-around, it'll be him. If you're serious about doing this, he might be the guy to talk to.

What is the rest of the group doing for a dedicated large-library mp3 player?

I think most people are just using off-the-shelf programs on their desktop PCs.

Well, what I really like about the empeg design is that it is just totally bulletproof. It does what it does (and nothing else) and it does it really well. The whole "tweak order" and "exclude as child" functionality is awesome and not something I am aware of in PC player software.

My goal is to have a dedicated home stereo component that plays mp3s that has a large library and is reliable (meaning not Windoze based).

The requirement is not really for me, but I also made an mp3 server for a friend of mine (who just ordered an empeg after seeing mine). He has a CD collection nearly as large as mine. He's not a computer geek like me, so what I need for him is a machine that can be left in the "player" software and be totally dedicated to that task.

Maybe what I really need is someone to recommend a linux mp3 player that has robust playlist structuring capabilty.

Thanks for the thoughts...
Jim

Have you checked out the Rio Central as Tony suggested? It seems like it fits the bill... and if it will take a 160gb IDE drive, then you'd be pretty set. You might wanna ask over at the HSX109 BBS.

Have you seen the Audiotron? It's a bit limiting for MP3 collections as large as yours but it's workable and it's a standalone unit. Basically it fits into your stereo rack, you run a CAT 5 cable back to your hub and the Audiotron will read all the data off of the shares it has access to on your network and stream music over the network through your stereo. I have one and I like it. My MP3 collection is comparable to yours in size and it is manageable, especially through the web browser interface.

As a side bonus, it also plays Internet radio.

Here is a link to the Audiotron on Turtlebeach's page.

Sounds like the new Rio stuff is probably more robust than the Audiotron but given the size of your collection, this might be worth looking into.

I keep all my mp3s on a linux file server sharing via samba. Then I use old PCs running Windows and WinAMP to play the music. Put a P133 next to each stereo in your house and you're set. Add a .m3u to the Windows startup folder so you don't need a monitor on each PC and you can make all changes on the server. May as well install VNCserver on each PC so you can remote control if needed.

Can the AudioTron work the same way that I use WinAmp? Or at least my Empeg?

I have a single playlist of all of my MP3 files, sorted by artist / album / track. Mostly I just listen in shuffle mode. Sometimes I turn off shuffle and jump around the current album, or leave shuffle running but jump to another track that I feel like listening to.

The Empeg lets me do this sort of maneuvering reasonably well, turning off shuffle lets me easily navigate the current (and neighboring) albums, and the Search button works well to find something quickly while letting me easily get back to the full playlist. An "Album" search would make it better...

My "Dell" (Rio) Receiver cannot function this way, which annoys me to no end. It's also extremely difficult to read the LCD from the couch or dinner / poker table, which is unforgivable for a piece of stereo kit.

The Rio Central looks nice, but not $1300 nice. Give me that interface, add SMB and/or NFS, ditch the HD and CDRW, price it at $500 or less, and I'll quickly hand over my VISA. Or integrate it with ReplayTV, that would be compelling!

An "Album" search would make it better...

I thought searching by album (Source) was one of the search options.


Sean

You are right. I had double-checked the search options before I made the post, but didn't realize that Source meant Album. Some sort of British slang of which I am not aware?

Source isn't slang - it simply means where the music came from! There are those that maintain that "Album" is confusing because it is widely understood to refer to vinyl media.

Neither is this a strange British decision - our American UI consultants were quite clear on the matter.

Rob

> Neither is this a strange British decision - our American UI consultants were quite clear on the matter.

I think they may have failed you this time. I have never heard that term in my life.

I like album personally. If I mean vinyl media I say record, but album is a more general term to me for a single work by an artist.

http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=source

I'm not suggesting it's a music term - just plain English.

Personally I prefer Album, although Source is an increasingly more accurate term as music is acquired by new means such as direct internet sales.

Rob

The Audiotron does work with playlists. That's how I manage mine.

Isn't the English language wonderful?

I was being facetious with the brit slang remark, and hadn't intended to pick this nit, however... Source=Album or Source=Input, depending on what you are looking at (top menu, search menu, remote). The meaning is arguably correct for each context, but if you have to argue...

Consultants=Shoddy?

-Bryce

If you could build a kernel with NFS or SMBfs support,
You should be able to mount /drive0 and/or /drive1 from remote. You would probably have to "upload" all the tunes through emplode and the empeg player and back again to the file server to do this, though.... Where is the database? is it in /drive0/var? Then this should be no issue.

Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)

Good point, but the consultants were consulting on the HSX109 (which doesn't have alternative input sources) not the car player.

Both products use emplode.

Rob

Always remember that "consult" is a contraction of two words: "Con" and "Insult".

Here is my take on the "Source" versus "Album" controversy:

The word "Source" is more correct, but I dislike it.

For me, an "ALBUM" is a unified work. A single entitiy, made up of a group of new songs by a single artist. For instance, Rush:Moving Pictures is an ALBUM.

However, sometimes the songs from an album can show up in other collections. For example, a Greatest Hits collection, or a movie soundtrack, or a K-Tel Rock Anthems Of The Eighties CD collection for only 29.95!!! ORDER NOW! OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY!

I think if you ripped the track Tom Sawyer from the Moving Pictures album, then the term Album is correct. However, the term Source is also correct, since the source for that particular copy of the track was Moving Pictures.

But if you ripped the track Tom Sawyer from the K-Tel collection, then the term Album is completely wrong. The K-Tel collection is merely the Source of the copy. The original Album is still Moving Pictures, but your ripper software drops the K-Tel collection name into that field. So, for that case, only the term Source is correct to describe that field.

Because the software doesn't know whether the song was from the original Album or from a collection, then only the term Source can be correct in all cases.

Thanks for the lead on the Audiotron. This might be the ticket. The RioCentral only has 1 disk space and I don't know if it works with the 48bit LBA 160GB drives. Even if it does, I'd need two -- at $1400 a copy. Not pretty.

This Audiotron is interesting, however. I have a few questions about it for those of you with experience with them.

1. Is there any issue with it interfacing to a Samba share from a Linux box?

2. The reviews claim that the RCA output sound quality is extremely poor, some even reporting "hum." Aparently, this is nonexistent when using the digital outs (as one would expect). What kind of digital outs does the Audiotron provide?

3. What can the group recommend for a reasonably priced DAC for home stereo use (used is OK). This would need to be compatible with the digital outs on the Audiotron. How does this configuration work for everyone?

4. What is the deal with the "over 30,000 song" database size limit? Is this a flash RAM limit? With 2100+ CDs, I am probably pretty close to 30Ksongs, if not over already.

5. Is there a BBS for Audiotron?

Thanks a ton! This might solve all of my problems!

Jim

You can also consider the Rio Receiver, which is essentially the same product as the AudioTron except it was designed and coded by the empeg team.

No digital out, though. Its RCA and speaker outs should be quite clean, however.

Drawbacks:
- Doesn't connect to a Samba share, the server needs to run specific software to work.
- Sorely in need of a point release to fix a couple of bugs, one of which is a database size limitation bug.
- Player software isn't as advanced as the Empeg Car software. For instance, there is no "tweak order" option.

Advantages:
- Can run third-party servers like JReceiver on Linux boxes.
- Very stable, can use HPNA or ethernet, great sound quality.
- Some hacking has been done, for example, you can run Displayserver on the unit as well as Voladj.

you just need one riocentral and you could use the free rio reciever in whatever area you want the 2nd one for

Drawbacks:

- If it doesn't receive a DHCP or server response, it hangs and cannot be power-cycled from the remote.

- The Windows software crashes when importing large playlist files. There is no "incremental" import.

- The LCD is extremely difficult to read from more than a few feet away or at an angle. (fatal flaw, IMO)

Advantages:

- Has a low-power amp.

1. Is there any issue with it interfacing to a Samba share from a Linux box?

No

2. The reviews claim that the RCA output sound quality is extremely poor, some even reporting "hum." Aparently, this is nonexistent when using the digital outs (as one would expect). What kind of digital outs does the Audiotron provide?

RCAs and S/PDIF digital. I use the RCAs. They sound fine to me.

3. What can the group recommend for a reasonably priced DAC for home stereo use (used is OK). This would need to be compatible with the digital outs on the Audiotron. How does this configuration work for everyone?

I have no experience here.

4. What is the deal with the "over 30,000 song" database size limit? Is this a flash RAM limit? With 2100+ CDs, I am probably pretty close to 30Ksongs, if not over already.

Yea, it's a memory issue in the AT. They have increased it from 10K to 30K so I guess it could increase again in future firmware releases.


5. Is there a BBS for Audiotron?

There is a mailing list at http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/support/forums.asp
There is also a BBS somewhere on TB's site but the mailing list is much more active.

Another thing to consider is that despite the fact that Best Buy blew out the ATs for $150.00, this is still a production product. It's supported well in much the same manner as the Empeg is here. Also one of the AT guys is on the mailing list and is quick to answer questions directed towards him.

The AT is constantly improving so what you get today probably wont be what you end up with next week. For example, and this probably isnt a big deal to a lot of people but they recently added a clock that will sync with Internet time servers. Totally out of the blue and it's "Here is a new feature."

Stuff like that is always pretty cool