Ok, I've read through all the threads on jEmplode and the various sorting issues in the latest version (69.0000000<some # of 0's here>1) so I *think* this may fall into the same boat, however I also thought someone might be able to add a few datapoints. In addition, I've got some other weirdness going on.

Just purchased my second empeg, a mark 2a (and will be sending my original baby off for some upgrades to the Eutronix guys soon). I wiped it completely and installed alpha 8 (I need the ogg support, 75% or so of my collection is in ogg). Put Hijack 419 on. Changed the anna vu background... you know, all the usual stuff.

I Fired up jEmplode (been using only jEmplode with my original empeg for a long time, since I only use linux) and started syncing my music collection. I have a moderate sized chunk of music (around 50 gig or so) so I divided it up into small manageable chunks and did several uploads and syncs. Now here's where the weirdness sets in.

First, like other people, I am having some *major* weirdness going on in the jEmplode sorting. I have to confess up front I'm not using soups at all (to be honest, I haven't really taken the time to thoroughly understand them). I normally just arrange my playlists as (Artist|Genre|Collections)->(Artist Name|Genre Type|Source of Collection)->(Album)->(Song) and I meticulously tag everything before transferring to the empeg. I keep everything except the actual track lists sorted alphabetically and the track lists themselves are sorted in track order. Everything actually lives under the Artist heirarchy, and I make links as appropriate to also sort them under the Genre and Collection subcategories (a poor man's soup, I'd imagine, and a ton more work doing it my way I'm sure).

However, no matter what sort order I set on the playlists, once I sync them to the empeg and go to down->down (the Artist list, if I haven't confused everyone thoroughly enough quite yet) shows as sorted alphabetically but WITHOUT the wonderful "The ..." frobbing (so all my "The Black Keys" etc albums are under T, not B). They show up properly in jEmplode, but do not show up sorted the same way on the actual empeg when I'm navigating the playlists. I even sorted it in reverse order, set the playlist order and resynched, expecting my ZZ Top to be at the top of the playlist now and nope... it's still at the bottom, with my AC/DC at the top. I just can't convince my empeg to honor the playlist order set in jEmplode no matter what I do.

On another unrelated note, my empeg is doing a file system check on EVERY sync. This is only happening on the new one, not the old one. I even disabled the filesystem check on sync in hijack, and it still does it. I probably need to shell into the machine tonight and run an fsck by hand to see what is up, but I thought before I did that someone might have some insight.

-- Gary F.

Thanks, Tony, but that's not it (I actually already knew this, although I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed heh). I neglected to mention that yeah, I have frobbed the playlist order appropriately and *always* check the playlist order before syncing. It's sort of something I take for granted since I do it automatically, so I neglected to mention it. I also tweaked the config.ini

Actually, I just finished a LONG and extremely error-ridden fsck. After taking apart the player to troubleshoot an intermittant hard disk not found error (this is the new one I just bought) I noticed that I have one of the infamous "badly crimped" IDE cables on this new guy. I did my best bet at fixing that, then ran out of memory while fsck'ing it... went back and enabled the swap and reran it and cleaned up all the errors. Rebuilt the database, fired up jEmplode, realized that quite a few albums were missing from my playlists. Scratched my head and forced a resynch and at least my playlists sort right now (will reupload all the music I'm missing tonight).

As near as I can figure, I'm guessing that I must've gotten a dirty filesystem a while back... (maybe due to the bad hard drive connection?) and since it's an 80 gig hard drive it ran out of memory trying to fsck it, then I just kept doing more and more syncs and it just got cruftier and cruftier until finally it just started weirding out on me as a plea for help. Once I cleaned up the filesystem and let it properly rebuild everything it started acting normal again. Does that sound even remotely plausible or do I need to stick to programming and leave the hardware and sysadmin work to someone else? (smile)

I guess this might be a good reason to upgrade the memory on my player after all... I went ahead and enabled ext3 on it while I was poking around with it, once things were cleaned up and acting normally. Any major "oh no, you really shouldn't do that" issues with using ext3 on this? (I didn't completely disable the auto fsck, just moved them out to something like every 60 mounts).

-- Gary F.

Ah, gotcha.

Well, for what it's worth, your experiences with messed-up playlists were something that I had happen on the V3 alphas, which is why I switched back to the stable 2.0 release and haven't had any playlist trouble since. I know you can't do that because you need Ogg, so let's just hope things work OK for you after you have your disk drive problems solved. Best of luck.

FWIW, I've had MAJOR problems with some of the V3's (like 9, lol... what a mess that was) but I've had only minor issues now and then with alpha 8 on my older player. My only real repeating beef with alpha 8 was the lavatory floor crash, but I just leave the visuals alone now instead of trying to show them off to everyone.

I did a few test syncs with individual albums and things seem to be working fine again for now. Now it's time to figure out which parts of my Rush collection got eaten

-- Gary F.