Hijack v352 is now avaliable.

This version incorporates a fix for the "battery icon after standby" issue that several people have experienced at various times over the past two years. Hijack now waits at least 250ms after turning on the display (and radio module) before reenabling powerfail detection. Previously, it only waited about 100ms (standard Empeg kernel value), but with other changes that have been made over the years, that value was no longer adequate in all situations.

The patchset for this version is larger than the theoretical one-liner fix, because I also hacked it to not do an inline busy-wait loop when invoked from the player process -- it uses schedule_timeout() instead whenever feasible, which will make it somewhat "nicer" to any other processes/apps that one may be running on the player.

EDIT: Also in v352: I removed the option to "power off the display" in the screen blanker, as this was never really satisfactory under all conditions, and is of dubious value. It also conflicted with the battery icon fixes in some combinations.

v351, released earlier but without fanfare, includes a fix for a small bug in the kernel whereby it was misdetecting the headlight/dimmer sense value on startup. Fixed in v351 (and v352).

Cheers

Wow, Thanks Mark!

Sweet thanks Mark, I was just going to ask about that problem, when I got my tuner the other day I noticed it having the battery icon problem.

>Wow, Thanks Mark!

You are very welcome, Brad. And your patience with this has been amazing!

Cheers

For the curious, the problem is that when coming off of standby, the display must get powered on again. And the tuner gets power only/whenever the display is powered (same hardware supplies the juice).

So, when the display/tuner are powered on, there is a momentary dip in voltage from the power supply, which can trick the built-in software power-fail logic into thinking it has to do an emergency "save-to-flash" operation and whatnot, the first step of which is to poweroff the display.. leading to..

Well, you get the idea. Now, the original Empeg code included logic to deal with this, by disabling powerfail detection for 100ms after the display is powered on. This worked great until Hijack started messing with the display control logic, slowing down certain internal operations to make them more reliable when used with the extra hacks Hijack provides. In the end, 100ms was not long enough for whatever reason, ESPECIALLY with a tuner drawing current from the same lines.

So, v352 simply waits longer (250ms is what I used, could probably get by with less, but..) before turning the powerfail detection logic back on.

Cheers

And you thought we were all crazy!

Mmm.. now that I've looked at it even more, I'm not so sure that any of this logic actually does anything useful any more.

The code USED TO turn off the display logic, to buy more time for it to write the player state to FLASH on powerfail. But because turning the display off is no longer a simple operation (as of MK2A players), the code (from Empeg) doesn't bother with the display until AFTER saving the player's state.

So why bother turning the display off at all now?

It looks like I could delete a few hundred lines of C code from the kernel without adversely affecting anything.

Anyone got an opinion on this?

Cheers

Less is more right?

Less kernel is definitely more buffer space/time for music, especially so on Mk1/Mk2 players (vs. Mk2A).

Cheers

Hmmm.. Im having a strange problem now, I no longer get the battery icon but now when I leave the car for a while and then come back and start it the empeg boots up and then goes into standby. I know the empeg would go into standby if it was in standby when the car was shut off but now it goes into standby regardless. To make it even more strange if it is playing and I remove it from the sled and then put it back it reboots and plays fine, the problem only seems to happen if the car is off for a while. Wierd....

Hi, I was wondering if the empeg booting into standby could be related to the screen blanker being removed from hijack, I read another thread about this problem and it was said by one person that turning off the screen blanker would fix it. Also it may be related to the tuner becuase before I was having this problem it would take along time for the empeg to turn back on with the tuner attached.

OK, I have found that it is hijack that is causing the empeg to boot into standby, I put hijack 350 on it today and the standby problem went away but of couse the batt. icon came back. Any ideas Mark?

Nope, no ideas. I'm waiting for more than a single player installation to demonstrate this problem.

Cheers

Mark, on the "less is more" vein, are there any features that could be "handed off" to empeg for future software releases to free up some room in HiJack? Such as having Volume Adjust, Bass and Treble appear with Volume, Fade and Balance? Sorry if this has come up before.

Bass and treble are currently implemented in Hijack by... um... hijacking two bands of the equalizer. So this is not an optimal way of implementing bass and treble. The right way to do it would be to use the DSP's built-in bass and treble features. So, in theory, the empeg guys could add that in version 3.0-something if we kept asking them really nicely.

As far as the voladj is concerned... The Karma has an automatic gain control feature, and since the 3.0 empeg software shares a code base with the Karma, it is feasible that a future (improved) version of the Karma AGC might possibly appear in one of the carplayer 3.0 alphas.

The Karma has an automatic gain control feature, and since the 3.0 empeg software shares a code base with the Karma, it is feasible that a future (improved) version of the Karma AGC might possibly appear in one of the carplayer 3.0 alphas.

Like the one it has now?

It's in 3.0 now? Did it just appear in Alpha 5, or was it in Alpha 3 as well?

I have to confess, I have not installed alpha 5 because of the database rebuild problems. The empeg is my daily driver and I need to be able to add and remove tunes without hassle.

I haven't installed Alpha 5 (because of the rebuild problem for the same reasons), so yes, it's in Alpha 3.

Dang, I completely forgot about that.

Now that I really think hard about it, I now remember it from Alpha 3.

They say the memory is the first thing to go... what was the second thing?

Memory.

So.... once we get a more stable 3.0 beta that we can presume a majority of people will be using, Mark could remove the volume adjustment from HiJack and free up some code?

I always wondered what the relationship was between HiJack and the empeg software. Or rather, how the empeg guys felt about it. I know that most, if not all, seem to be using it. But would they consider "borrowing" some of its features or would that not be fair to Mark? How do things like this usually work?

>How do things like this usually work?

Totally fair. Except they probably don't want to copy line-for-line from Hijack, since all kernel code (including Hijack extensions) is GPL'd, and excessive copying from it to the player code might "taint" the closed-source player with GPL issues. But featurewise, feel free -- especially anything on the audio pathway like Bass, Treble, L/R Alignment, ...

The built-in VolAdj in the player seems to respond differently from that in Hijack, so the Hijack one stays put for now -- especially since Hijack is tuneable for one's own preference of response/attack rates. But if the player were to expose it's parameters for config.ini tuning, then we could nuke the Hijack version.

Cheers

Thanks Mark. That makes sense.

Does anyone know any keywords we have to put in this thing to get it seen? Does "Visuals" still work?

Visuals only worked for Toby.

Bass and Treble is something we've bugged the empeg guys many times in the past about, even on the private alpha testers' list, and they haven't yet added it to any version. Suffice it to say that they know we want it.

Regarding the difference between Hijack Voladj and the V3 AGC... John has some ideas about how he wants to improve it, and there are plans afoot to change it. It will still use a somewhat different algorithm than Hijack, so leaving Voladj in place would still make sense.

Tony,

Have you heard anything about ReplayGain support on the alpha board?

--Nathan

The empeg is my daily driver and I need to be able to add and remove tunes without hassle.

I've not added any tunes for a while (haven't bought any CDs recently) -- why would you want to remove tunes? -- so I'm still happily running v3.0-nightly20030815, which I installed when I was still at Rio.

I'm thinking about installing v3.0-alpha5, but I'm worried that it'll be less stable than what I've already got. Fortunately, I found the upgrade file I used originally, so I'm now safe to try it.

Personally, I'm planning on installing v2.0-final, uploading whatever I need to, and then installing v3.0-alpha5. Alternatively, if I'm using Hijack (which I've never yet done), I'll just keep different player binaries in the /empeg/bin directory.

I've not added any tunes for a while (haven't bought any CDs recently)

Well, in my case I'm always buying music. On top of that, I'm always listening to studio sessions (which the emepg is GREAT for), but it means constantly updating new reveisions.

why would you want to remove tunes?

I often borrow CDs from friends and upload the tunes onto my empeg. If I decide not to buy the CD, I'll delete the tracks off.

As for this whole stability thing, I really haven't had many problems with aplha 3. I've had to reboot it maybe twice in the last three months. I guess I'm just getting lucky. The only thing I wish were fixed is the crossfading TO wma files. Was that fixed in alpha 5? Even if it was, though, I still need to add/remove tunes.

Personally, I'm planning on installing v2.0-final, uploading whatever I need to, and then installing v3.0-alpha5.

I don't know for sure, but I seem to recall that this won't work. 2.0 and 3.0 use different database types, yet 3.0a5 won't rebuild databases. So if you're going to go "down" to add content, it's gotta be down to 3.0a3 rather than 3.0a5.

There is also the manual database rebuild that others have described, so you could look up how to do that.

Ah, bummer. For some reason, I was hoping that empeg towers had an Alpha 6 floating around with the database thing fixed.

I was hoping that empeg towers had an Alpha 6 floating around with the database thing fixed.

Even if there were, I wouldn't qualify for a copy -- I don't work there no more, remember?

I am on the alpha team, but we've had nothing since v3.0-alpha5.