I don't think I've seen this one reported before.

A few days ago, I got in my car and started driving with the empeg playing. Before I got to the end of my street, so less than a couple of minutes after startup, the song playing suddenly stopped playing. No noise coming out of the speakers at all, as if I had accidentally pressed the pause button. (I hadn't.)

I looked down at the player and it didn't appear to be paused (no double bar icon), but the time display wasn't changing. I figured it had locked up, but just to test that, I pressed the pause button. When I did, it showed the pause icon. I pressed it again and it showed the play triangle icon for a normal-seeming amount of time and it then went away, still without any music or progression of the time display.

I held down the right button to try to fast-forward within the track. The time display changed, but there was still no sound during the fast-forward and when I let go, the time display still didn't move beyond where I had fast-forwarded to. So I pressed the right button to go to the next track, which it did, but it sat at 0:00. I played around some more, and everything seemed to work fine except for the fact that the player wouldn't make the speakers do anything and the time display never moved in a normal fashion on its own.

Removing and reinserting the player fixed the problem. The track I was playing was a CBR MP3 that I'd played 8 times before, according to the plays counter, including once just the day before, as I was listening to the same album twice, back-to-back. I also verified that it played fine after I got it back up.

I would think that this seemed like the pause bug, but I hadn't been, to paraphrase a Sun engineer, pounding on the pause button like a wild monkey, I didn't hear any quick blast of sound when I paused or unpaused, and the time display didn't progress in either the paused or unpaused state.

Anyone else seen this?

I think I saw this same thing just last weekend. I had pressed buttons, like you, but then just power cycled and didn't think twice.

If I remember right though, for me it was while I was FF through a track. I let off the FF and I started seeing that behavior. I hit pause, tried FF again, and skipped tracks. But the power cycle did work.

I observed something like this one time, before I replaced the hard drive cable in a unit, and I attributed it to "unable to do i/o to the disk"; The cable died like the next day or so. Powercycle recovered it. As to whether there was any truth to this, I don't know, because I never saw it again and had no way to investigate it at the time.

Hmmm. That's possible, as I had an odd dropout the other day, too. My cable's worked fine for about two years now, so it probably isn't the cable itself, but maybe it's working loose.

...not quite sure what you meant by the 'Pause Bug';

I have seen a mute/pause issue, where mute and pause get out of sync. - ie the player gets muted when playing, and unmuted when paused. Happens very rarely, and fixed (only) by reboot...it could probably be eliminated fairly easily by the empeg guys - currently the (stock) kernel only has a mute_set ioctl, and not a mute_read ioctl, so the player doesn't error-check the mute status when setting it.

Does this play into what you saw??

That's the ``Pause Bug'' I was referring to, and that's not what I was seeing because, with my problem, the time display was stuck, which is not a thing that I would expect would happen with the Mute/Pause issue. Plus, I never got a short burst of sound, which seems to be a common symptom with that problem, and it just happened out of the blue during playback without me touching the controls at all.

Ok..

In that case I'd also suggest a loose drive cable as a probable culprit.