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?

___________
Tony Fabris

The new bootup screen displays the version number as well as the assigned name (such as "Tony's Empeg"). My question is: Is this the player version number or the kernel version number?

If you had a different kernel version than you had player software, would this number show differently than in the player's "About" menu?

___________
Tony Fabris

The Set Playlist order dialog allows you to set the order of tracks independently of the view order - it defaults to the current view order, however.

The "also set view order" check box allows you to sort the playlist, and then apply that sort order to the view.

If you can think of ways that that feature could be improved (other than the speed - I'm working on it), let me know.

Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

Hi Tony, thanks for the comments. Very useful as usual and I'll play with emplode and the player some more to get to know all the new features. There's one thing I don't understand in your post. You said

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.

What's EmpegUpgrade, and which browse button do you mean? Is it something in emplode?


Henno
mk2 nr 6

Thanks for clarifying that, Roger.

Except for one thing... I'm still confused. I don't know what you mean by the difference between play order and view order?

I think what you're saying is that the box allows you to sort either the on-screen view that you get in Emplode (the same thing as clicking on the colum headers in Emplode), and it also allows you to change the track's sorting order in the playlist as they're stored on the Empeg (the same as dragging them up and down in the list to change their "position" number).

Is that what it means? If so, okay, now I understand. I don't know how those boxes could be re-worded to make it more clear to newbies, though. I mean, heck, I'm certainly no newbie and I still didn't grasp it.

___________
Tony Fabris

What's EmpegUpgrade, and which browse button do you mean? Is it something in emplode?

EmpegUpgrade.exe is the program that you run to upgrade the empeg car player software. It appears on your "Start" menu when you install a new version of Emplode.

When you run it, it asks you to locate a file with the extension of ".upgrade" (the file you download from the empeg web site), and it has a "browse" button so you can pick the file through the GUI and you don't have to type in the full path and file name.

Roger changed that program (at my request by the way- too cool! Thanks, Roger!) so that when you hit the "browse" button, it remembers the last folder you got the last ".upgrade" file from and gives that to you as a default. Before he did that, it was always defaulting to "My Documents", a folder which I never use. I was getting tired of having to go folder-fishing every time I upgraded my Empeg. Now it will always remember that folder and go back to it.

___________
Tony Fabris

I've always just double clicked the .upgrade file. Works like a charm.

TommyE

I've always just double clicked the .upgrade file. Works like a charm.

Somebody just shoot me. I never realized you could do that. First the Emplode event sounds, now this. I'm just going to go crawl into a hole now.

___________
Tony Fabris

Don't feel alone, Tony, i missed this one too :-)

Nils aka Dr. Brain ... :-)

EmpegUpgrade.exe is the program that you run to upgrade the empeg car player software.

Didn't know that. I've always upgraded via emplode => tools .
Works like a charm. Allows me to only have emplode on the desktop.

Henno
mk2 nr 6

I think what you're saying is that the box allows you to sort either the on-screen view that you get in Emplode (the same thing as clicking on the colum headers in Emplode), and it also allows you to change the track's sorting order in the playlist as they're stored on the Empeg (the same as dragging them up and down in the list to change their "position" number).

Basically, if you would like the listing in the empeg to be by artist, you modify the playlist order using this box. Very nifty.

OK next wish said while rubbing old lamp
I wish that you could list tracks by:
- playlist locations
- PIN entries
- search for song locations

SHAZAM

Murray 06000047
____________________

Yeah, that's about right, Tony. I'll try to clarify it for anyone else who's having difficulty.

The playlist is sorted into a particular order on the player. You can adjust this order in emplode by dragging the tracks around. This only affects the play order (with shuffle off). The menus still display the contents sorted alphabetically.

You can view the playlist in emplode in a different order, by clicking on the column headings (emplode now does both ascending and descending, btw).

We added the ability to use emplode to change the order of the tracks on the player. This is independent of the view order. We did consider having a simple "Set playlist order to current view order" command, but couldn't decide where to hang it. So we went for the dialog box that's there now - the default choice is based on the current view order, to optimise the most common path.

Now, since the playlist order can be changed separately from the view order, I added a checkbox to the dialog so that you can change both at the same time. And no, I'm not sure how to make it clearer. If anyone thinks of anything, let me know.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

I'm a little confused. Do you want to be able to sort the view by these things? You can sort the view by the current playlist order already, or is this not quite what you mean? We could sort by PIN, if we add it to the list. You can currently sort the playlist by any of the columns you can see.

My current plan (and this is in no way an official statement of what will actually happen) is to make the column listing a bit more generic, so that you can choose which columns appear in the view, making it easier to sort by more stuff.

Similarly unofficially, hopefully I'll be working on a search facility at some point soon. I'm currently in the middle of some code cleanup that'll make this easier to implement. I need searching myself - I'm currently using the mk1 that was in the A-Class until we have enough mk2's to go around the office - and there's some "S Club 7" on there that needs to be eradicated .

Rest assured, there's a whole bundle of stuff on our internal wishlist for emplode. I'm working my way down the list, slowly but surely...


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

And no, I'm not sure how to make it clearer. If anyone thinks of anything, let me know.

Well, here's the way I see it (off the top of my head).

Since you can set the view order by clicking on the column headers, there's no need to have the dialog box do it for you.

If you use the dialog box to sort the playlist's "position" order, then it should sort the screen-view by "position" when it's done. Every single time. That would be the visual feedback the user gets from performing the sort. If they don't like it, then they can refresh the screen display order by hand after the sort is done.

I think that the way you've got it working now is more powerful, but more difficult to understand as well.

I have to qualify all my comments about this feature with a disclaimer, though: I would rarely, if ever, actually USE the feature. The only time I care about track order is when I'm putting an album into the Empeg and I care about preserving the album's running order. But these sorting features don't have the ability to sort-by-album-position because the Empeg doesn't store that information in the MP3 tags. And not all MP3 tags have that information anyway, only ID3v1.1 and up has this kind of data. So I have to get the sort order right as I drag them into Emplode and that's the last time I ever care about the order of the tracks in a playlist.

Anyone else have any opinions?

___________
Tony Fabris

The only time I care about track order is when I'm putting an album into the Empeg and I care about preserving the album's running order.

Absolutely right

Henno
mk2 nr 6