My Empeg will play a song, abnd suddenly out of now where, it will stop playing the current song and play about 3 to 5 seconds of another song, that is not in the current playlist. I could be playing Ray Charles only to be rudely interupted by the caterwauling of Cindy Lauper.

It sounds seriously uncool and it has happen for a while now. I would reckon that i can dicern a pattern, but if I had to guess, it happens no more than twice during a running session while its on. It seems to be random when it happens.

anyone else seen this forced preview?

If you go back and play that same song again, will it produce the same ``preview''? Was the previewed song recently played or soon in the playlist? Have you recently had to perform an fsck?

Is Cyndi Lauper actually shown in the track info, or does it still say Ray Charles is playing, but you hear Cyndi Lauper? If it's the latter, then I am almost certain you have some corrupt MP3's. This happened once when I lost power while my music drives were mounted RW, and I had to do a fsck. After the fsck, random bits of songs were strewn about my MP3 collection. I'd say it affected 30 or 40 songs in the same manner you speak of -- random bits of a song will appear in other songs.

If it's the former, then, uh, that would be interesting...

Do you have some gear in the passenger seat that might be sitting on top of the remote & hitting buttons? Just a thought.

-Zeke

I could be playing Ray Charles only to be rudely interupted by the caterwauling of Cindy Lauper.

Did you happen to download that Ray Charles song from a P2P file sharing service?

The thing you describe sounds suspiciously like something that some people have been doing in an attempt to kill the P2P services: Deliberately screwing up MP3 files and putting them up on the file sharing services.

The idea is that people will download the song from the service and listen to the first 30 seconds or so and will be convinced the file is good. Then they will leave the file available for download and it will continue to circulate in the file sharing service. By screwing up the song somewhere in the middle, and only for a brief instant, the perps are ensuring that the file will only be discovered to be "bad" at the most irritating moment... when you're actually listening to and enjoying the song.

In this way, they hope to make people doubt the integrity of the files they get on these services, and therefore stop using them.

Then again... you could just have some cross linked sectors on your hard disk...

it's cross linked sectors - i have fsck'd in ages.

All my mp3's are pristine before they hit the drive, and the name of the other song does not come up. it just plays a few datagrams from the other song and then returns. THe original name continues to scroll across the screen.