I tend to add music to my empeg only once every month or two. I'd saved up a bunch of new toonage, bumping me up from 40 to over 50GB (10427 tunes altogether). Since I'm always tweaking and cleaning up tags with iTunes, I deleted everything and started over, loading up the empeg with jemplode (prerelease 45, I believe). When I went to delete some accidental directories that had no files in them, the empeg rebooted in the middle of the sync. Okay, fine. I got out my WinXP laptop and was able to do the cleanup with the real emplode.

So far, so good.

I put it back in the car. I'm now experiencing three consistent, reproducible problems.

1) My empeg no longer remembers its playlist. Every time it starts up, it shows me an empty playlist. It takes a solid minute to regenerate the playlist, so this is kinda annoying. After that, it will work normally until I turn off the car. Turn it back on and the playlist is gone again.

2) Roughly 18 seconds into playing the first song, there is always a pop and the music is subsequently quieter. This happens no matter the song. It's always the first song after the playlist is constructed. Subsequent songs might have pops as well, but not at a predictable location.

3) If you hit the left button to restart the track, it just sits there at 0:00 time, not advancing, but not paused. The pause button will display the pause icon, and pressing it again makes the icon go away, but no music. Hitting foward and then back makes the music start playing again like I wanted.

I'm running my trusty original MkII with the 2.0 release software, developer build, plus the Hijack kernel (not sure of the version, maybe it's version 340, but it was right after 2.0 final came out). The only Hijack features I'm using so far are volume adjust and the left/right time delay.

Again, all of these bugs are consistent and repeatable. Any ideas what the problem(s) might be? Could it be the lack of RAM in the MkII? Should I switch it out for my MkIIa? Could it be a problem with the database, perhaps a side-effect of using jemplode rather than emplode? I figured I'd check here before I start poking around every possible loose end.