I like 12c a lot. I had it running through my lunch hour today. I haven't noticed any new bugs yet. Some of the old "known" bugs are still there, but it's certainly added some good stuff, so it's definintely worth the upgrade.

The fact that it de-dupes the shuffled list was immediately obvious. There were certain songs on my unit which fell into multiple playlists: Those songs tended to come up far too often when I shuffled the whole player. Now it seems to have a much more proper distribution of the tracks when I do this. Great stuff. Bravo!

(We're going to have to talk about how it chooses which songs to delete when it de-dupes. But that's for another time.)

The "Browse" button's memory on EmpegUpgrade works great now. I even tried to deliberately break it by renaming the folder and going back in, and it handled that gracefully.

I also noticed that I no longer needed to unplug the power cable before applying the upgrade. It did the upgrade just fine when I started the process while the player was cranking out tunes. Excellent. (However, there was an interesting screen of garbage graphics just before it rebooted the player after performing the upgrade. I noticed it put up my custom logo during the upgrade, maybe that memory area is corrupted during a hard reboot and it just needs to turn off the display before it reboots?)

The text part of the player's bootup screen (the part that usually just scrolls some Linux text messages) has been updated. It's now got multi-window formatting and includes a tiny empeg logo. You can only see it for a split second, as usual, but it looks nicer now.

I'm still evaluating the new caching as it relates to track gaps. The release notes say that it's been improved. I've noticed that it seems to be better than it used to be, but still not perfect when I compare it to the WinAmp gapless output plug-in I'm using. I think it's because the empeg's decoder doesn't treat the MP3 frames as one continuous data stream, it only treats the resulting wave data as a continuous stream. For instance, it finishes decoding the first MP3 file, then says "okay, I'm done", then goes on to decode the second one. So the decoder doesn't count the last frame of the first file and the first frame of the second file as if they were part of the same song. So there's still a slight dropout between the two- at least on most of my test Pink Floyd tracks. This is just a guess, though, I don't know how these things work at the low level. But that's the effect it seems to have. It's not bad or anything, the dropout is just the tiniest split second, so it's not really irritating.

The intermittent bug with the occasional track skip is still there in 12c. I've posted the relevant info to the current thread under "Bug Reports".

The "Append by title" (et al) functions no longer reshuffle the currently-playing playlist. However, it still pauses the playback of the current song when you append the new song (as always- we still would like to see those functions to background-thread instead of interrupting the player. Is that even possible?). Also, it (by design) still appends that track to the end of the current playlist instead of inserting it after the current song. Any chance on an "Insert by title" feature any time soon?

I like the new "Set Playlist Order" box in Emplode. However, you can only select this menu item when you've got an actual track selected. What about sorting sub-playlists of a parent playlist? Also, what's the "also set view order" check box do? I'm not sure I understand its intended function.

Oh, and I like the new startup screen in Emplode. Pretty.

Now, I just need to get Richard to make us a new 12c-compatible volume-adjustment kernel and life will be perfect.

Anyone else have anything they noticed about 12c?

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Tony Fabris