Thanks Frank! I was more than happy to wait for displayserver 2 for this to get fixed but this is great!

Sean

#78

Well, how about I give him a free "thank you" ice-cream at the Amersfoort users meet in a couple of weeks (you are gonna be there, aren't you Frank?)

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

Just tried this on my empeg, and got an error "List index out of bounds (8)" when clicking the Start button.

It's running on a Win2000 Pro station, csv from my 20 GB Mark II, running Displayserver fine.

Any ideas?

did you edit the CSV at all? Mine hung after I altered the CSV file in Excel, so I had to edit it in Notepad...

32GB (JUST UPGRADED!) Mk. II BLUE
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

did you edit the CSV at all?

Nope. Just did a clean dump from emplode. Give me a program with a CSV import feature, and I will break it :-) (/me remembers everyone loving the empeg remote control via serial that came out a while back, and it hated me :-)

I get "List index out of bounds (15)" _every other_ time I click 'Start'. The other time, nothing happens. Any ideas?

Since one of my two 80GB disks in my (unbacked up) Win2000 RAID-0 stripe set just failed, I'd like to get most of my MP3's back at least (though losing near to 160GB of media files is depressing)

I thought the whole point of RAID was so that you didn't get failures like that?

(Don't worry, I know what you mean. I've had my own share of bad experiences with stripe sets.)

___________
Tony Fabris

I thought the whole point of RAID was so that you didn't get failures like that?

(Don't worry, I know what you mean. I've had my own share of bad experiences with stripe sets.)

I try to avoid striping-only RAID sets. OK, you get large continuous logical volumes at expense of (slightly worse than) linear decrease in reliability (measured as probability of your filesystem staying with you (as opposed to bidding you farewell) at any given time interval). Mirroring is waste of space, Level 5 and similar incur performance penalty.... As Doug says, tanstaafl!

I don't even use RAID arrays for database storage. I prefer to hand-allocate volumes on continouos regions of physical drives (taking into account that seek times vary across the disk), manually assigning tablespaces, logspaces etc to them, and let DBMS manage mirroring (of course, where I can). More often than not I find after a while several heavily (and mostly concurrrently) used tables allocated into the same physical chunk of storage, competing for read head's attention. Ah, one never learns ones application's secrets completely.

I think that something like Veritas volume manager (with not only drive spanning, striping, mirroring, but hotspot detection and online reconfiguration) should be as standard part of every OS as text editor .

Now, was it OT or what?

Cheers!


Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

In my experience, RAID 0 = BAD. I have built exactly two RAID 0 systems, and have experienced 100% failure in that arena. I had one Cheetah 10,000 RPM hard drive decide it was hungry and eat itself, and also one WD 2GB that found better things to do than serve my data (one of which was being thrown off the roof...)

Oh yeah, and back to topic... VERY nice Frank!

-Trevor

-----
Mk 2, Green 12GB 080000349

What does your CSV file look like?

Here is how the first line should look like :

"fid","type","length","title","artist","comment","genre","source","year","bitrate","codec","duration","offset","samplerate","tracknr","options","refs","contents"

the order of fields isn't important. I only use the field which has the columnheader "fid" as the same index, which is probably always the first, so it is important that you keep the first line when deleting some lines.

Frank van Gestel

Hmm, using 1.03 I get:

"fid","type","length","title","artist","bitrate","codec","duration","offset","samplerate","tracknr","genre","source","year","comment","refs","contents"

which is in a different order. But as you say that shouldn't make a difference. I haven't edited the CSV file at all - it is "as is" from export from Emplode. I'd love to get what looks like a tremendous utility working. Would upgrading to Displayserver 2.0 (alpha) make any difference?

Re: RAID-0 - I used it before with happy experiences, but as they say "the past is no guide to future performance". I was aware of the risks going in so I only have myself to blame. Worse thing is that I'm sure that the data could be recovered (by replacing the stepper motor, most likely) but the data (or rather the time to rip CDs and DVDs) isn't worth the $1000+ cost to get it done. Oh well...

I will try compiling a (network only) version of the emptool library some day in the near future. I will tell you if it worked out well.
However, I already dug in emptools sources for a while, and it seems as if that ReadFidToMemory is just the function we are looking for. PLUS it seems to provide a way to backup any player configuration files (well those of the standard player at least), including identity, general and network setup. I really wonder why noone of those mighty programmers around here didn't go and try this out month ago. I hope I get it to work, but even if not, I think I will be able to create a empbackup/emprestore program set for linux at least.
I will take a deeper look at the emptool sources during the weekend, and hope to be able to tell more by monday.

So what is the currect status on this tool? Is the 2GB limit still present? Also, Frank, do you still have a PayPal account set up for this?

32GB Mk. II in a WRX
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

Hi.

I didn't get the emptool library source to compile under windows yet, at least not in the way I wanted it to compile. There are some facts about it available at my homepage http://www-new.incase.de/framed/empeg/, namely in the programming section. If someone wrote a tool to get a specific FID as a file from the player (and I think someone did this already, just don't have the time to look for it right now), and - even more importantly - upload a file to a specific FID on the player (which is yet to be done AFAIK), it would be fairly easy to write a small C wrapper to those tools that downloaded the complete music database (MP3s included) from the player to a directory on your disc or to upload the whole directory back to the player.

cu,
sven

proud MkII owner (12GB blue/green/smoked, was #080000113 is #090001010)

I would glady pay someone to develope an easy to use tool like this. I don't have the know-how to do it, and feel bad for crying about the lack of a back up utility. But as my collection nears 6000 songs, this would be nice.

32GB Mk. II in a WRX
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

Once 2.0 beta is out, i think Frank will have a solution.

Sean

I would glady pay someone to develope an easy to use tool like this.

Uhhh, yeah. What he said.

At the risk of repeating myself, all I want is a Windows Icon (or a menu selection in Emplode) I can click on that will ask me what directory path I want to save to, and then the program would write a single big file that is unreadable, unplayable, uneditable -- just a big tarball that can only do one thing: restore an empeg to exactly the state it was in when the backup was made. It could even refuse to restore to anything other than the empeg that created it.

From my position of invincible ignorance, it seems like this would be an easy program to write. But then, my programming skills are pretty heavily taxed just to write a program in Q-Basic that displays "Hello, World" on the screen.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

just a big tarball that can only do one thing: restore an empeg to exactly the state it was in when the backup was made

It would have to be a series of small tarballs, each one not to exceed 2gb in size.

That's probably the reason Frank's program didn't work properly after 2gb: The Windows 95 file system has a 2gb limit on single files. That's upped to 4gb on Win98 if you use Fat32.

___________
Tony Fabris

Hi.

That's probably the reason Frank's program didn't work properly after 2gb: The Windows 95 file system has a 2gb limit on single files. That's upped to 4gb on Win98 if you use Fat32.

While this is true (Win98/FAT32 can handle 4GB files), the windows explorer is (and many other apps are) not able to handle files of more than 2GB so you are strongly advised to only create files up to that size.
One way or the other: It is not possible to back up a complete empeg collection to a single file, at least not under normal Windows or even Linux file systems. A tar to a tape would be possible though, at least under Linux.

cu,
sven

proud MkII owner (12GB blue/green/smoked, was #080000113 is #090001010)

I understand the copyright concerns of wanting the single big file approach, but I have to admit that I want the actual mp3's back. I did most of the uploading with my notebook (and some with my PC). My notebook doeesn't have 32GB of free space, so most of the songs have been erased. And considering that some of the files are on another machine (that only has 12GB total drve capacity), I was not able to archive all my hours and hours and hours of encoding. I want to go buy a 80GB drive, and use it to copy my mp3's to my pc.

32GB Mk. II in a WRX
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

I say, if you have MkII, go ftp route.

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

One way or the other: It is not possible to back up a complete empeg collection to a single file, at least not under normal Windows or even Linux file systems. A tar to a tape would be possible though, at least under Linux.

Or to a raw partition, which is what I'm currently thinking of doing.

normal Windows or even Linux file systems

Linux 2.4 ext2 and Windows 2000 NTFS have large file support (my 2000 machine had a 3Gb IMAP logfile that I'd forgotten I had told Outlook Express to make).

Peter

Has anyone tried building rsync for the empeg?

--
Toby Speight - 040103385

Hi.

Has anyone tried building rsync for the empeg?

I just did a build of rsync 2.4.6 for the empeg, which is available from my site (http://www.incase.de/framed/empeg). Have a look at the files section. I did not build any installation files neither did I test it. I only did the build.

cu,
sven

proud MkII owner (12GB blue/green/smoked, was #080000113 is #090001010)

"RSYNC is a program for copying files between networked computers. It is "special" because if the same file already exists, it copies only the differences between the files, therefore saving network traffic. Thus, you can make a mirror copy of a hard drive, and keep the two copies identical over a modem link."

This sounds really cool, maybe the functionality of this could be built into amold's utility somehow.

Sean

For those of you who are still looking for a backup utility that can suck all the mp3 files off of an empeg, someone else has written it.

See the post here: http://empeg.comms.net/php/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=empeg_general&Number=38723

Amold wrote a nice utility for Windows that works with USB or IP and simple sucks every mp3 down to a directory....

Thought I would point it out since it wasn't mentioned in this thread recently.

=-Clarke

______________________________________
Queue 351, Now Mk II #60000022 18gb, Blue

Thanks smu; I've downloaded and will test later.

BTW, some of your links are broken in /framed/empeg/empeg.shtml you link to a bunch of *.html that should be *.shtml (for example, files.shtml...).

--
Toby Speight - 040103385

For the linux users:
empeg> tar cf - /drive0 | nc 123.123.123.123 12345

123.123.123.123> nc -l -p 12345|tar xf -

Works quite well.

Now if only somebody could give me the nc sources so I can build a statically linked arm version ....

>if only somebody could give me the nc sources
>so I can build a statically linked arm version

http://rtr.ca/empeg/nc-1.10-4.src.rpm (includes arm patches).

-ml