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Sadly, I don't have the space available to store everything in FLAC to reconvert at will, so I don't want to re-rip only to re-rip yet again, later on.

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just to confirm, Ogg requires v3alpha8

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Are the issues reasonable to put up with, just for the Ogg support?

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Does the alpha seriously break anything from 2.0final?

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is the MP3 decoding done via software or hardware, and, if the latter, does using Ogg, rather than MP3, cause any significant impact on CPU/RAM usage?

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Sadly, I don't have the space available to store everything in FLAC to reconvert at will, so I don't want to re-rip only to re-rip yet again, later on.

Well, Ogg Vorbis is lossy, as you know, so if something even better comes out, you'll still need to make this decision. My advice to you: rip to FLAC and then archive to DVD-R.

Yeah, that would mean purchasing a DVD burner, though, and I've already blown my current toy budget on hockey gear. At the moment, I'm reasonably happy with the lossy compression -- my re-ripping *everything* is just because, since I have to rip a ton of stuff now, anyway, I figure I might as well redo everything else just to just get it all in the same format. I found that my time spent in the ripping/encoding is minimal compared to the tag editing, so once I get the tags done, I plan to keep a mini-cddb.

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Are the [v3alpha] issues reasonable to put up with, just for the Ogg support?

Depends. I've been using v3 alphas exclusively for over a year and, while I do get some issues with v3a8, I've been generally happy. It does occasionally reboot on me, but I can live with that. I don't, however, use the radio that much, so I can't comment on the level of functionality there.

Ah, cool. Occasional reboots, I can deal with. I'm not a frequent radio user, either (mostly it's just a click over to radio to show passengers that it's there, and tell them that I put the tuner together from a kit ). I'll see what info I can dig up about alpha/radio issues.

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Does the alpha seriously break anything from 2.0final?

IMO, not seriously, no. And gapless playback is worth the cost, as far as I'm concerned.

"Shuffle mode on, down, down, down" -- pretty much negates the need for any sort of gapless playback.

I really need to setup per-album playlists.

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is the MP3 decoding done via software or hardware, and, if the latter, does using Ogg, rather than MP3, cause any significant impact on CPU/RAM usage?

All of the empeg's codecs are software. The Ogg Vorbis codec is heavier on CPU/RAM usage than the MP3 one, because we got a StrongARM-optimised MP3 decoder from ARM, and the Ogg Vorbis (and FLAC) decoders used in v3a8 haven't had as much optimisation work carried out on them.

Interesting info to know.

Thanks!

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"Shuffle mode on, down, down, down" -- pretty much negates the need for any sort of gapless playback.

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[T]hat would mean purchasing a DVD burner, though, and I've already blown my current toy budget on hockey gear.

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Yeah, that would mean purchasing a DVD burner, though, and I've already blown my current toy budget on hockey gear.

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Why do their wives put up with it?

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[T]hat would mean purchasing a DVD burner, though, and I've already blown my current toy budget on hockey gear.

I just bought a dual-layer DVD burner for less than $80. Maybe that's a lot to you; I don't know.

No, when you look at it as just $80, it's not that much at all. The problem in my case is that "just $80" here, and "just $80" there has a tendency to add up very quickly, because I say that *too* often. :-D Also, about half my salary is currently being shunted into my 401k, because I forgot to reset the contribution level back to a sane amount after increasing it at the end of last year to max out my contributions, which isn't leaving me much play money at the moment.

I'm kind of at the point where I want to get rid of all my computer junk (I'm limping along here with a Pentium MMX, and a DEC Alpha), so I'm not particularly keen on buying more hardware until I can replace the whole kit-n-kaboodle. And then see above.

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It's probably because hockey hair is just so damn sexy.

On some of us!

I am one of the people that voted "yes" above. Not sure if I can answer your questions directly during lunch, but I am in a similar place as you -- cap to FLAC, keep running v3Alpha8?

With a low (or maybe zilch!) likelihood of another Amerfoort surprise, I have considered reverting to 2.0, but, yeah, I love that crossfade! I would probably revert at some point though. For one thing, I ripped/encoded a whole bunch of new stuff into Ogg, but screwed it up I think -- too high quality? -- and they are oversaturated and I get noticable distorting of highs in playback.

So, if I am going to redo those, I am thinking FLAC and more disk space to cover the optimist/pessimist bases.

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All of the other issues are much easier to live with. There's the songs getting marked problem that's been mentioned before. There's the song name being changed to "various" on occasion, this has also been mentioned before.

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And every now and then I have a problem uploading songs, and the connection dies. It's on occasion been a bit of a pain to cleanly recover, needing to get in via telnet or the serial port to run fsck.

Yuck. I don't like the sound of this. I can do it, but I'm lazy. I'm now in the Apple stage of my computing -- I just want it to work (says the guy that runs custom kernels on obsolete hardware).

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And there's been a few issues with emplode.

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Hydrogenaudio.org and rarewares.org are the best resources for ogg stuff,

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including hints about reccomended versions and pentium 4 compiles.

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I'm positive it's not my mp3's, but occasionally it will lock up.

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Yeah, I had that happen once, but I just slammed the Empeg down on the table real hard and it started right up again.

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...and they say violence can`t solve problems.

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WARNING: That was a lame karma joke. Do *NOT* slam your Empeg down on the table real hard! I repeat: Do *NOT* slam your Empeg down on the table real hard!

Yeah, use your knee instead.

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Has anybody ever gotten rid of a big ecapsulated whatyamacallit nodule in somebody's hand with a nice heavy book?

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I guess my last question now (not necessarily directed at you, but the thread readers in general), is, what are the ramifications of upgrading, and then deciding to down-grade back to v2.0final?

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Loss of the use of one of my guitar-playing hands...would be a problem.

How many non-guitar-playing hands do you have, Tony?

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The book trick always sounded dangerous to me.

Ach, Cookie disynchronization! I see belatedly that the non-sequitur continued! Anyhow, now we thankfully have a dedicated Ganglion Cyst thread. Some guy named Bitt looking for *factual* information. Factual information??