Hi All,

I don't often post, but have owned an empeg for a number of years. I read (or stalk) this bbs on a bi-weekly basis and have enjoyed the sigkill, international solidarity, humour and not least help of so many people that contribute to this great community.

But to be blunt (could you see this coming?), I have a gripe! I love the carplayer with its pca tuner, I use it on a daily basis as the only headunit in my car.

But it has flaws, 99% have been solved by looking here, but after 5 years of owning one, they are becoming sigkill so much more apparent. I'm aware this is becoming a rant, but I've had a few beers so I'll keep going...

Is v3a11 the furthest the empeg can go?

and...

If so (wait while I duck), why is v3a so much 'worse' than v2b13 that was released ~4 years ago?

cheers,

Raas

"a" is for "alpha", "b" is for "beta". Wikipedia probably defines those terms nicely but, in brief, "beta" means "almost release quality", and "alpha" means "experimental quality (ie. buggy)".

To answer the question more fairly, v3a11 is a regression (w.r.t. sigkills et al.) because it involved a major shift in the underlying code base -- massive changes.

Cheers

V2 was a development branch specific to the car player, which was a supported product at that time. Testing, debugging and all those good things were carried out and the resultant v2-final is very stable as a result.

V3 is a sort of bonus release. Its development branch was dedicated to the Rio Karma and other new products. Keeping the car player target alive was a personal undertaking for some of the developers, who largely put in the necessary effort in their own time (and who had a software manager who tolerated/encouraged this!). We wanted to release from that branch because it has a whole new audio path, support for additional formats, and many new features over V2. However there was no official testing and no official sanction from the owners of the codebase (at that time) to do any of this for the car player. The most recent V3 releases were developed as specials to coincide with owners meets, thanks to a few individuals (notably Peter and Dave) giving up their weekends to do this. Now, from what I hear, even the V3 branch has been deprecated, tucked up, and put to bed - perhaps permanantly.

I would be surprised if there is another release - and if there is, it will be thanks to an individual digging out the code and putting in their own time to work on it. As there are increasingly few empeg developers remaining at Sigmatel (who own the code), this seems unlikely. I'd like to be proved wrong.

In practice, I choose to run V3 (and have done so for the last couple of years) as its quirks are fairly well understood and are generally easy to avoid or work around.

Rob

Thankyou for the honest response.

I develope software and know the red tape and issues often found. In all honesty I assumed alpha led to beta which led to.. well whatever, if there's no chance of that, or no-one available then v3a11 is the final nail!

Thanks again.

So, for the few of us out here not getting it, what is a "sigkill"?

Wikipedia to the rescue again, SIGKILL.

I know what a sigkill is. I don't get why it appears in his post unless he is trying to make some odd point. In which case I still don't get it.

It appears in a tiny popup box on the front panel display of his empeg (courtesy of Hijack), just about every time that the player s/w crashes.

I get about one sigkill every 3 days I'm using the player as a player, and always have since going to 3a11. The difference is when I installed 3a11 I always used the player as a player, and now I use it a lot as something capable of aux in.

Is there a way to release a player update that does not include the MP3 decoder since all of us already have it on our players? Ie, more of a "patch" than a completely new install?

Am I missing somthing, or am I very lucky,I have been using both of my players for 5 years now and they never have a problem. I have one in each car and they never misbehave. I do use the v2 final and some older ver. of hijack 350... I think, but they always seem to work fine. (mrfixit knocks on wood very hard)

Well you have a very good point there. Maybe some of us should just post things like my empeg works great.

I received my empeg sometime around July of 2000. Aside from an immediate VFD problem, mine had operated flawlessly until a couple months ago. (It's still broken - haven't gotten around to finish fixing it - but I have another one now.)

Yup mine has never had a problem either and its in use about 8 hours a day.

My empeg works great, even after being heavily modified on the hardware side... Running hijack and 2.01... I like cross-fading and gapless, but I like stability (while driving) more...

I would have a look at your hardware first before assigning SIGKIL faults to the system, or player, software. Have you had a memory upgrade? If so, get it checked out.

Hi,

I use the radio for the majority of journey's these days, so it would be handy to have the search capability easily accessable. I can't remember which was the previous stable release to have this feature.

I'm not sure if your reply was to me, but just in case it was, I have a stock player with a pcats tuner module. In fairness the SIGKILL error and crash happens when using the tuner (on average once every 15 mins) and very rarely when listening to MP3.