Sorry for this brash approach, I hope this is not a breach of protocols, but I wanted to make sure people here were aware of this opportunity:

Dell has the Digital Audio Receiver at an outstanding price of $149USD! These are a great way to move you MP3's off the PC or car player and into other rooms of the house.

{end blatant advertising}

Am I right in thinking that the this is only available on the Dell US site and that they don't ship outside the US ?

__
Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

Dell US only, I just picked up a couple. See http://rioreceiver.comms.net rather than discus here I guess

- --
Rod, UK Mk2 64gig Red S/No.341

These are a great way to move you MP3's off the PC or car player and into other rooms of the house.

Does this mean that SonicBlue endorses copying of tunes from Rio Car to something else using Displayserver, ftp or some other means?


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

Actually, I'm glad you posted that info. At that price I'm considering purchasing one. And since I never visit the Rio site I wouldn't have found out if it hadn't been posted here. Thanks! (just don't make a habit of it )

DiGNAN
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, etc.

Don't start me off...

Paul.

Paul Haigh, Reg. 4120
(mk1) 6GB, Blue, 00254
(mk2) 12GB, Red, 00357

It doesn't actually MOVE the mp3's... it's just a reciever, no storage, that streams from your PC. I'm guessing that's what he was referring to. Or were you just being sarcastic.


|| loren.cox ||

Well, you managed to sucker me into buying one just to play with it. I almost never have my PC on at home though. Perhpas I'll create a cheap and quiet server to sit there and host for the Receiver.
Could I get away with doing this on a 486 using the Linux server? Maybe that's a better question for the Rio BBS but if anyone wants to respond with their thoughts...

Could I get away with doing this on a 486 using the Linux server?

Dunno! Try it and let us know...

Maybe that's a better question for the Rio BBS

... over on the Rio Receiver BBS.

___________
Tony Fabris

Or were you just being sarcastic

Perhaps slightly.

I mean, empeg-car does not (officially) support Rio Receiver server-side SW, does it? We know Hugo & Rob demonstrated it, but in order to listen to our empeg-resident tunes via Receiver, we commoners would have to copy them to a PC, right? (I know, I know, we should have left them on the PC after ripping in the first place.)

Now, streming from empeg to Receiver is not exactly the most urgently needed feature, but it would be kind of cool to have it (but VR first, please!).

Cheers!

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

Yup, you can do it. There is a web site on the Rio Receiver BBS with some .... hackable... software for use on linux.

I say it that way, because.... well, It's not quite done. One of my programmers also purchased one of the $150 Dells when I did, about a month ago. I've had him tearing the code apart and re-doing most of it.

The original programmer (and all of this is secondhand...I'm not a perl person..... It's definitely Write only code in my opinion... Reading is NOT allowed), did enough research on it to get it working in his setup... and that's about it. I'm glad he did what he did, as it certainly is making our life easier during the rewrite, but we're trying to fix up a bit of it, clean up the code in general, and make it a bit .... Prettier.

Little things, like being able to randomize more than 50 songs. DB independance (it's currently DBM files... We're putting it to postgres, probably with the DBM's still available), general stuff like that.

And yes, once it's better than we have now, it will be put out there for general download.

I mean, empeg-car does not (officially) support Rio Receiver server-side SW, does it?

No; the server software is quite big and takes quite a lot of memory to run, so it'll probably won't be a part of the standard car player software any time soon.

Has anyone from the LDAP-server-and-Xwindows-on-empeg brigade succeeded in running the freeware receiver servers on a car player yet? (After quitting the player software, of course.)

Peter (who suspects you lot like a challenge...)

Personally, I haven't tried, simply from the amount of programs that would be required on the empeg. Honestly, I think it would probably be easier to just have the empeg's data NFS mounted on a server PC.

You would have to kill the player executable, have perl (not known for being memory friendly), dhcpd, NFS server, and a http server (apache). Certainly it MIGHT fit in 12 Megs.... But I wouldn't try it.

That's with the current code. It's possible to reduce it, and certainly some things, such as DHCP serving could and should be offloaded from the empeg. But frankly, so should serving anything off of it.

But... give enough swap space and sure... It could work. Might be a tad slow

Subtlety at it's finest.

Isn't a BBS for bouncing things off other people? I don't want to waste time and money trying this if someone has already done it with less than good results. I have spent some time searching through both BBSs for this information but still felt compelled to ask.

Isn't a BBS for bouncing things off other people?

Oh yeah, of course. I didn't mean to be rude, sorry.

What I meant to say was that:

a) You're probably the first person who's wanted to do the exact thing you described, so you're going to need to be the guinea pig for the rest of us.

b) We would love to hear if you're successful or not.

c) The proper place to announce your success would be the Rio Receiver BBS since we're deliberately trying to shift discussion of the product there.

___________
Tony Fabris

You would have to kill the player executable, have perl (not known for being memory friendly), dhcpd, NFS server, and a http server (apache). Certainly it MIGHT fit in 12 Megs.... But I wouldn't try it.

The current solution using perl and an in-memory database would certainly give problems. It would work though if the receiver is booted from a windows machine, and the music served from the empeg, using the same method as displayserver: read fid-files as requests come in. I haven't had the time to look at the protocols extensively, so no real conclusions can be made, other that that I'm going to be busy for some time...


Frank van Gestel

It would work though if the receiver is booted from a windows machine


I'd have to look at it, but, based on my memory of the protocols/implementation, you'd have to hack/modify the windows executable to point it to the empeg box. Once that is done, then certainly, it's possible to serve the files off (does displayserver support resumable http connections? The receiver requests 32k of the song at a time.) There would have to be some hacking into displayserver as well, as a heck of a lot of the logic of the unit's operation comes from the server side... ala the other part of the perl puzzle.

I'm all for it if we can hack the windows part to return the server as being the empeg.... Maybe that could be a future enhancement to the product...

http://www.forbes.com/2001/05/15/0515tentech.html

Here's another piece of sonic blue news. Kinda cool actually.

Calvin

I want one...
I had been following the news around transmeta starting about a year ago, but I stopped some time ago ( empeg maybe? ). It's great to see a true application of the crusoe processor come to life in this great little machine. I hope it has wireless keyboard and rubber protector strips like on remote controls


Frank van Gestel

I'm still holding out for a 256bit Transmeta chip based computer that will let me select "x86, PowerPC, ARM" on the side.

I knew I missed something over the last couple of months...

Frank van Gestel

Their existing chip could do this as well, in fact, all the current ones are 128 bit running an X86 emulation core. It's just a matter of getting the emualtion core in place for each processor type they want to emulate. It's definitly neat to have a processor that is programmable :-)

I'm just wondering what the other chip makers are going to start doing once Transmeta does move out of this low power intel compatible mode and into other areas.

We had one on the booth at CES - it was running Display Server, hooked up to the car via 802.11 - a cool demo.

At least it WOULD have been a cool demo had we had the network passwords!

Rob

The page now says $199. I guess the $149 promotion is over?

Bill B.
Mk.2 SN 080000183 - 38 GB / Green

Phew, got my order in just in time. Perhaps it was the fact that a few of us ordered last week that alerted Dell to the fact they should up the price.

Perhaps its a good time for the Empeg folks to talk to Rio/Dell about some development spend for a new release of the software

- --
Rod, UK Mk2 64gig Red S/No.341 2xDell RioReceiver

We have a Receiver alpha team in place now, and a software update is already in progress. It'll take a few months though, as we have some higher priority stuff to do first (not least of which is Car 1.1).

Rob

When I ordered mine it still said $149 and they billed me for $199. What was weird was the first confirming email said $149 + s&h and the second one gave a total of $207, talk about a ripoff on s&h ;) I had to call them and they fixed the price.

Brian

-See my empeg here-

Damn, didn't know that it was a promo. That stinks. At that price I was considering getting it for my dad, but didn't have the money at the time. Oh well.

DiGNAN
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, etc.