Haven't really gotten into the FAQ too deeply, have seen info on popping and crackling on playback, but that's not my problem. After playing for a few minutes, the song will become garbled, and at loud volumes, it scares the hell out of me.

The other day, it did it (the first time since I've had it). The empeg stopped responding, but would start playing again. I gained enough control to power it off. After a restart, I got the no hard disk found. It was hot out, but I had just brought the player to the truck from inside, so I don't think it was a temperature issue. Took the player inside, and it immediately booted up. Took it back outside, and it was fine.

Drove to work this morning, no problems. Driving home, first 15 minutes, no problems, then I skipped a track, and the player behaved like it was paused. I pushed play again, nothing. I skipped the track, went to the next song and it played fine. Almost home and the high pitched garble started again. I was at a long stoplight, so I turned the truck off, the player seemed to be paused and didn't power down. I pulled the player, and re-docked it. Came on, played for a minute, started to screw up, so I just powered it off.

I'll probably check the docking connectors before opening the player. But, I'm guessing it is the hard drive going bad (misread sectors or unreadable sectors). If anyone has had the same experience, please share. I guess this is as good of an excuse as any to upgrade the drive(s).

I'm running Emplode, and the consumer release 2.00, beta 7, so go easy on the requests for output data. That's one thing that I haven't got into yet. Maybe an update of the Empeg software would help.

I'm headed to the gym, so I might not be able to reply until tomorrow, but I figured I'd give you guys some brainstorming time. Thanks in advance.

Forgot to add that I got an "Invalid File Type" error on an mp3 that had already played countless times.