Took my Karma with me yesterday to experience the thrill of riding on a motorcycle, and it seems it didn't like the ride too much.

About a mine outside of some small town, I noticed the music had stopped. I attempted to fat finger the controls thinking maybe pause had been bumped, but no matter what I did, I couldn't get music again. So, I pulled over, and took the Karma out of my pocket to see it was on, with a pause symbol in the corner. It was on the Now and Next screen, and everything was frozen. Any attempts at using the controls failed.

I went into the gas station I had pulled off at, and asked for a paperclip. Upon resetting the Karma, it proceeded to rebuild the database for some reason. Once this was complete, it resumed playing back my list of songs, about 2 songs back from where the lockup occured. From then on all the way back home, it played fine. And as far as I can tell, no music is missing from what I can select to playback.

Any ideas on what happened? This is my first hard lock on the device since owning it, and it definitly came as a suprise to have it happen when the unit was mostly idle, compaired to the extensive use it sees every Friday night.

I had this happen to me as well, Monday, at the gym. It was bouncing around in my pocket as I was doing cardio on an elliptical trainer. At some point, I fat fingered the karma to skip to next track and it just locked. Spent 13 minutes w/ no music.

Paperclip from front desk fixed it, but battery had run down to 3/4: I suppose the drive was left on during the lock.

I'd really like to get an armband as I think there's less jarring near my shoulder joint vs. my pocket for what I do.

Edit: don't think mine did a DB rebuilt though: it booted up pretty quickly

-brendan

I asked Tom to post this because I didn't know what causes database rebuilds. It's one thing to have a bug that requires a paperclip, but it's another thing entirely to have it rebuild the database afterwards.

He's on 1.41 by the way.

Disk corruption while trying to update the database (which it does regularly) seems to the most likely explanation. I can't imagine a motorbike is the most hard disk friendly environment.

Rob

On a related topic, day 5 of my Karma and it's already buzzing heavily in the left channel, esp on disk seeks.

I guess it's time to RMA.

-brendan

Quick check - do you have a ground loop? Do you only notice it with the player plugged in to external power, or do you hear it while on battery only?

Battery only. Did an A/B test using the same headphones with my sister's Karma: clearly mine is defective (or broken).

-brendan

Worth a shot.

Does the Karma actually update the main database for play counts and such instead of writing that data elsewhere like the empeg? Thats the only situation I could see this happening, since the Karma had the active playlist set in a nice stable enviornment 1.5 hours before this occured.

Does the Karma actually update the main database for play counts and such instead of writing that data elsewhere like the empeg?

Yes, but it does so via a temporary file, so only a disk failure at rename-into-place time should cause a rebuild. I'm still a bit mystified by this, to be honest.

Peter

only a disk failure at rename-into-place time should cause a rebuild.

I think this is what happened. Took it out for another ride, and had 5 different times where the unit stopped playing music, then would resume a few minutes later. The last time it happened was when I was off the motorcycle taking a break, and when it did, I pulled it out to hear the drive repeadiatly clicking, trying to seek data. Oddly, that was the last time it did it, and it worked fine for the hour ride home.

Still didn't trust it though and took it back to Best Buy to be replaced. Got a new Karma, and $20 back for the price drop that has occured. Though I fear I may be replacing this one soon too, as the first attempt to upgrade to 1.41 (from 1.07) resulted in a loud click of the hard disk and a bad karma, hard disk not found error. Second attempt worked, but that one click hasn't been the only one I have heard. All with no music loaded beyond the demo songs at this point.

Care to hire me to weed out the defective hard drives? :-)

Care to hire me to weed out the defective hard drives? :-)

Hey, if you get hired, send me a wheel The support people have been useless.