I'm feeling like a post whore here...

I pulled my drives and drive cable from my Mk2a and put them into my Mk2 as I prepare to send the Mk2a in for repair.

Now, random tracks do a little "hickup" or stutter when it gets to 12 seconds in. Would something happen after 12 seconds that would cause this on a Mk2? Are the drives spinning up or something? This just seems so odd.

I did reuse the cable, and I wouldn't be surprised if this player also had an IDE connection problem, but the 12 seconds seems odd. (This problem was not happening on the Mk2a, but I was getting odd drive or IDE issues, mainly in-car).

PS - On a side note, my empeg has had a top button that has been falling off everytime I remove the facia for years now. Before, I could just put the thing back on, but now it's not working anymore. Seeing as this is my backup, it's not high priority, but is there anyone out there that has these blue buttons and would be able to repair it? Is this a common part?

hi there m8, i had the same problem as you, just that my songs shutterd about 8seconds into any track, turned out to be a faulty IDE-cable...

Interesting... well I have two new "Magnum" cables on their way.

New, extra length cable. Fixed.

Still odd that it stutters every 12 seconds into a new track. I wonder what the player is doing at this point. Does the RAM (Mk2 vs Mk2a) make a differance in the time? Maybe the database size?

I would guess it to be the amount of space you have available for caching. This is dependent on both database size and type of player / amount of RAM installed. I suspect that it would be caching 12 seconds worth of data and, when it tries to spin up the drives to get more, runs into a glitch.

That's what I was thinking too, but I don't get why it does it only at the beginning (ie, at 0:12 and not at 0:12, 0:24, and0:36, etc).

Perhaps there is some level of caching for the beginning of tracks that are nearby in the playlist to allow for faster track transitions.

Perhaps there is some level of caching for the beginning of tracks that are nearby in the playlist to allow for faster track transitions.

There is.

Brad, borrowing information from a nearby thread... Try setting your car_rate to 115200 and see if that fixes the 12-second stutter?

If it works, I'll FAQ it.

Yeah, I did wonder if notify stuff was being sent 12 seconds in or something.

Interesting. Yesterday, I thought that the stutter was fixed with the new drive cable, but I was rifleing (sp?) through the tracks rather than let them natually progress to the next track. Not sure if that made a differance, but while the problem seemed fixed yesterday, I did catch it happening today. It's certainly happening far less than it was, but I did catch it happen, at 12 seconds on the nose.

So browsing the forums, I figured I'd put the serial rate to 115200 (all of this has been happening in the docking station and in-car, didn't ever test on straight AC). I also put the "notify_suppress=1" in the config.ini. I havn't had the stutter come back, but I'm going to test for a few days and post again.

FWIW, with all the problems that I had with my Mk2a, I didn't have this one. It only popped up when I switched the drives over to the older Mk2.

Nope, still happening, although less frequently.

Hm. Less memory in the Mk2. But I don't have an Mk2, so that's not my problem.

Weird.