Hi

I'm using the Mark Lord web interface to stream to my notebook, which I'm then in turn using to stream to a Shoutcast server. Occationally, my ID3 info being sent to the sever will display "[Buffering 35%]http://MY IP etc..." Or it will show "[Connecting] blah blah". So there is a little delay between when Winamp tells the server "here's the new song coming up" and when it gets the song going via the empeg stream.

I've reduced the buffer size in Winamp from 5000ms or whatever the default is to 2000ms to try to reduce the chance of the buffering message getting displayed, but sometimes there is a delay waiting for the drives to spin up.

Currently, I have the empeg in Standby during my shows because I don't want the display on for 3 hours if I'm not using it and I don't want it playing music because then the player ap and Winamp will be competeing for disc access.

Is there a way to put the player in "@Work" mode, have @Work put the drives at "spindown=0" and not have the player running? Would putting the player in pause work? If so, what about burning my screen in?

Part of me is thinking about ditching the empeg for this, and just hooking the 200GB upto my firewire port, but it's so much easier to find stuff on the empeg!

The problem is that the player application manually sets the spindown for the hard drives. The impression that I've gotten is that it specifically tells the drives to spin down rather than setting a timeout. This should mean that you could compile a copy of hdparm for the empeg and use it to tell the empeg's hard drives to spin back up. While the empeg's ``off'', I imagine the player wouldn't try to do anything with the hard drive, so turning it off and then running the appropriate hdparm command should do it.

Exactly how you'd want to get that done, I don't know. The only way I can think of at the moment is to telnet into the empeg after you've turned it ``off'' and run the hdparm command by hand. Maybe the new EXEC features Mark is adding to hijack might let you automate it in some way, though. Or at least use the EXEC via ftp instead of having to install a telnet daemon.

Try this in config.ini:


[hijack]
;@WORK spindown_seconds=1195


That sets the spindown timeout to its (near) maximum of 19:55. Or, you could try setting it to 0 instead (zero), which may give an infinite timeout.

This will work just fine in standby mode, because it's regular disk accesses that are waking up the drive, not the player software, and it's the drive itself that's automatically spinning down again (except for the 0 setting).

-ml