I cannot for the life of me get emplode to work in my 64bit windows 7 machine. It will open the database fine and recognize the player over ethernet but as soon as I try to upload music or change something on the playlist it crashes. It says windows has a problem and had to stop emplode....any clues what's going on? Using v2.01 firmware btw.

Could be a 64 bit thing but more likely Windows 7 I'd guess.

Tried running it in XP compatibility mode?

Jemplode is another option.

Nope. Works fine for me on 64-bit Windows 7.

What version firmware and emplode are you using? Jemplode seems to work but as soon as it starts to synch it chokes up and gives me a socket error. For some reason it cannot keep a connection to the player. Do I have to do anything special to my router to allow it access? What about ip addresses, should it have a specific ip? my local ip is a 192.168.2.x address...does that matter? I am pulling my hair out here!!

Two questions, to help us find a diagnosis:

1. Has it worked in the past, on a different computer? If so, was the working computer on the same network?

2. What version of Emplode are you using? You mentioned you are using player firmware version 2.01, and you asked Roger which version of Emplode *he* was using, but which Emplode are *you* using?

I have used it on this computer in fact I used it earlier in the evening in an XP environment but it was over usb not ethernet. It was way too slow and took over an hour to upload one album of about 8 songs which was about 300mb. I am using the latest version of emplode which I downloaded that night. I am using the version for 2.xx firmware. I want to do this over the network and have had problems ever since I started using windows 7.

I cannot use xp all the time as my other drives that I have data on don't show up so it's of no use to me. Plus I would like it to work with 7 so I don't have to boot into an alternate os.

I'm using emplode v2.00 over Ethernet. The player is running v3.0a11. The player is plugged into the network two switches away (both Netgear GS108s).

If JEmplode chokes with that error, then I suspect a networking problem. If discovery works (i.e. the player appears in emplode/JEmplode without needing its IP address specified explicitly), then it's unlikely to be your router (because it shouldn't be even vaguely involved).

Which leads me to my next question:

What, if any, firewall software do you have loaded on that PC?

It does have the ip specified but I don't see how that matters. No firewall software at all, just using the router as a firewall.

So, car-emplode-v2.00 then? Good.




Understood. Ethernet is so much faster than USB! Question: Have you ever had it successfully work on Ethernet on XP?

(What I'm trying to narrow down here is: is it an ethernet configuration issue or is it a Win7-64 issue?)

Oh yeah, I have been using it for years with no problems. It was only a problem since I installed windows 7. I loaded xp on another hdd and use that when I need to. I built one of the i7 machines with no serial port and had problems from the get go. I had to install xp just to get anything to work and it was working on the network.

Hi,

What are the setting on your network card (or motherboard controller)? In the FAQ, it recommends that you run it in 10Mbps Half Duplex. Have you tried this? It's a good place to start.

For reference, my simulation system is running and i7 920 with Windows 7 Ultimate. Two weeks ago, I used it to load 335GB of song database via ethernet to a player over a several day period. During this time I decided to horse-around with the ethernet configurations to see what would happen. I tried the following connections and hardware configurations:

1) I found an old 10Base-T switch and connected it as a private net (only the computer and player connected). Used this for the majority of the load. Worked great, except the collision indicator flashed during the database song loading. It didn't flash for fast events like loading the directories and such only the long activities.

I was going to snoop it to see why, but I just surmized that it was probably throttling due to disk rotational latency as it wrote the large files to the disk. I attributed it to packet re-transmission requests. Someone stomp on me and help me pull my head out, if I got this wrong.

2) I have run it on a smart ethernet switch as well with the motherboard ethernet controller set for auto-negotiate on both the private and whole house network too. I found that running it on the private network didn't slow things down as much and I was able to use my other main computer for internet and other activities. If you have a lot of other ethernet activity on your network, you might starve the player from receiving the IP packets.

3) I also tried it with a fixed address (per the FAQ), for the empeg player and Network Broadcast modes in the options menu of emplode. I tried this in the private and whole house network.

4) jemplode also works fine too.

5) It works fine with both computers (the other one is an older 2.66GHz Core 2-Duo using XP SP-3), on the whole house network. I can use either computer to get to the empeg with emplode. XP works fine with 10Mbps Half-Duplex or auto-negotiate on it too.


All of these worked fine. I don't think you will have success running it with a 100Base-T. I have not been able to get that to work of course as the player hardware won't support it. Some systems Controllers (and Switches) use high speed net health probing which might cause a problem.


Questions:

1)You are not trying to go direct connect are you (ethernet null or crossover cable)? It always works better with a router or switch. I have tried many switches too - and they have all worked for me - old ones and the brand-new ones - even tried some of the smart switches and they have worked for me.

2) Since you are using a 100GB drive, Is it okay for him to be using the LBA48 Hijack software when his drive is less that 128GB?

Ross

It matters because if you did have firewall software installed, it might be messing up emplode's connections. This might have been manifested by a need to enter the IP specifically, rather than using broadcast discovery.

Agreed. With a decent switch, you usually don't need to mess about with speed and duplex settings. All of the testing we did at empeg was with Netgear DS108- and FS108- series switches, so that's what I opted for at home (GS108).



Obviously, Mark's gonna have the definitive answer here, and I could be wrong. But: yes.

Yes. The kernel only uses the LBA48 commands for accesses that require them, beyond the first 128GB or so on each drive.

Cheers

Ok, I think the problem is solved. I did have a static ip on the player instead of letting it assign an ip on it's own. Well, I booted into xp, changed the player to DHCP, rebooted and reloaded windows 7. I started up Emplode, connected to the player and voila! It started synching with no crashes! yaaaay!!

I loaded around 2 or 3gb worth of data with no problems so I guess it was the static ip that was causing the problem. I don't think it was a conflicting address but whatever it was it works now.

Now my only problem is every time I synch I get a long checking disk integrity ordeal that I have to sit through. I have two hdds=130gb so it takes forever to get through. I do get failed to unmask ide errors every once in a blue moon but I know the drives are good. So maybe an ide header or bad filesystem? I did have to re-solder the header a year or so ago but I haven't touched it since so there shouldn't be any cold solder joints. Any suggestions?

Is that you on bass?? Awesome!

Congrats on the fix, too!

Yessir it is! Thanks!

That's great!
I sure wish there was a bigger rockabilly scene out here. I sorely miss it from when I lived in Cowlumbus, OH. Good times.

Aren't the Hillbilly Hellcats from that area? Maybe it's Colorado...not sure. I thought Cali had a HUGE rockabilly scene? I guess it's bigger in LA vs San Fran....how far is LA from you?

Try here.

tanstaafl.

"Failed to unmask IDE" is definitely hardware trouble of some kind. It's due to one of the things on this list. Something as simple as a loose cable or an intermittent cable crimp, or as complicated as a failing chip on the motherboard.

Well I checked the header and it didn't look like anything was wrong then I checked my cable. I bought one of the two hdd cables that apparently had crimping issues. I looked at the middle connector and low and behold it looked a little shady. So I broke out the pliers and crimped it a little tighter. Then I discovered I had a 250gb hdd lying around from a laptop someone had brought in for repair and never picked up. So I slapped the hdd in and I am now in the long and arduous process of uploading all of my music back to the player.

I've got about 240gb of music which all of it isn't going on there but it is going to take a few days to make it happen....wish me luck with it!

BTW I didn't stress test the hdd, are there any signs of a bad hdd I should be on the look out for? It formatted and pumped ok but I have had a 0x80040038 error....anyone know what that is?

What do the synchronization errors mean?

Unfortunately 0x80040038 translates to "Unknown Error". Argh. Although there's good news: Another thread here on the BBS describes 0x80040038 as "Could not connect to socket".

It's possible that the description at the link I gave above for 0x80072736 also applies to your situation. Is there a chance you have a total of 28,000 songs and playlists total?

Ok, now I am having sigkill errors! I had a failed synch when I was loading about 20gb or so of data, about a 8 hour synch or longer. anyway, I was getting the long building databases when I plugged the player in so I tried to do a synch to correct it, well now it gives me an error 0x80072745 during the synch and roboots to a sigkill 0000.19 error, rebuilds databases and then is fine until I unplug it and have to rebuild the database every time.

empeg-car bootstrap v1.02 20001106 ([email protected])
If there is anyone present who wants to upgrade the flash, let them speak now,
or forever hold their peace...it seems not. Let fly the Penguins of Linux!

e000 v1.04
Copying kernel...
Calling linux kernel...
Uncompressing Linux..................................... done, booting the kerne
l.
Linux version 2.2.17-rmk5-np17-empeg55-hijack-v508 ([email protected]) (gcc version
2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #2 Fri Jan 9 16:06:35 EST 2009
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revision 9
Checking for extra DRAM:
c1000000: wrote ffffffff, read e28cc001
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 9, serial number 30102295) 16MB DRAM
Command line: mem=16m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 15000k/16M available (996k code, 20k reserved, 364k data, 4k init)
Dentry hash table entries: 2048 (order 2, 16k)
Buffer cache hash table entries: 16384 (order 4, 64k)
Page cache hash table entries: 4096 (order 2, 16k)
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP
TCP: Hash tables configured (ehash 16384 bhash 16384)
IrDA (tm) Protocols for Linux-2.2 (Dag Brattli)
Starting kswapd v 1.5
SA1100 serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options enabled
ttyS00 at 0xf8010000 (irq = 15) is a SA1100 UART
ttyS01 at 0xf8050000 (irq = 17) is a SA1100 UART
ttyS02 at 0xf8030000 (irq = 16) is a SA1100 UART
Signature is 67706d65 'empg'
Found custom animation at offset 0x99380
Tuner: loopback=0, ID=-1
show_message("Hijack v508 by Mark Lord")
empeg display initialised.
empeg dsp audio initialised
empeg dsp mixer initialised
empeg dsp initialised
empeg audio-in initialised, CS4231A revision a0
empeg remote control/panel button initialised.
empeg usb initialised, PDIUSBD12 id 1012
empeg state support initialised 0089/88c1 (save to d0004c80).
empeg RDS driver initialised
empeg power-pic driver initialised (first boot)
RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
ide_data_test: wrote 0x0000 read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0xffff read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0xaaaa read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0x5555 read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0x0000 read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0xffff read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0xaaaa read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0x5555 read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0x0000 read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0xffff read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0xaaaa read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0x5555 read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0x0000 read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0xffff read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0xaaaa read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0x5555 read 0x8080
ide_data_test: wrote 0x0000 read 0xefff
ide_data_test: wrote 0xffff read 0xefff
ide_data_test: wrote 0xaaaa read 0xefff
ide_data_test: wrote 0x5555 read 0xefff
hda: WDC WD2500BEVE-00WZT0, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: WDC WD2500BEVE-00WZT0, 238475MB w/8192kB Cache, CHS=30401/255/63, LBA48
empeg-flash driver initialized
smc chip id/revision 0x3349
smc9194.c:v0.12 03/06/96 by Erik Stahlman ([email protected])

SMC9194: SMC91C94(r:9) at 0x4008000 IRQ:7 INTF:TP MEM:6144b MAC 00:02:d7:26:08:f
7
Partition check:
hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4
RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 320 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
empeg-pump v0.03 (19980601)
Press Ctrl-A to enter pump...VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
change_root: old root has d_count=1
Trying to unmount old root ... okay
Freeing unused kernel memory: 4k initempeg init 0.8
I see this is a developer image!
Mounting proc
Mounting first music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19
Mounting second music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hdc4 but got error 6
Error mounting partitions (possibly already mounted)
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
No secondary hard diskStarting player
Timezone: EST
Hijack: intercepting config.ini

hijack: removed menu entry: "Serial Port Assignment"
kftpd: listening on port 21
khttpd: listening on port 80
player.cpp : 587:empeg-car 3.00-alpha11 2005/07/25.
! tags.cpp : 61:Failed to open tags (0xc0041002).




heeeellllp!

Hi,

Ya got no tags, dude.

Looks like you may have the same problem I had recently.

An easy identifier, go to /empeg/var and if you don't have a database file and a playlist file, the player needs to rebuild them. When you are at that directory, type ls -la to see the directory files.


Go into the current thread "builder_bigdisk_v3 now available" under the Forum List General section. Start with message #340780 and specifically #340815 where Roger told me to how to have the player rebuild the database and playlist files in /empeg/var. A good example of this is shown in message #340932. It shows the BEFORE with the files missing and the AFTER with the files there after the rebuild. Make sure you do the "rom" as Roger mentions at the end of his fix.

Ross

thanks, I'll give that a shot!

Ok, somehow or another I lost all the tracks on my player. To be safe I rebuilt my drive installed 2.01final instead of 3.0. I am still getting a weird error 19 and error 6 on my hyper-terminal readout....what this all about? I seem to be loading music without any problems so far.

What is the most I should try to upload at any one time? I am doing 2-3 gigs at a time...is this safe? I've got approx 51,000 files in 3,400 folders, would this amount of files and playlists affect the database or player at all? Should I get more memory? Anyone got any for sale?

Hi,

The error 19 you refer to isn't related to the reiserf's as it goes through the boot sequence is it? As far as I know, that is normal.

I'm not sure about the sigkill error, but as to your question about file sizes...

I just completed a full (mostly full - 355GB) load on the dedicated, private net I mentioned before.

I also wanted to see the maximum database size I could download into the player.

The following is not recommended for loads, I just wanted to see what the top end was. I think the 2 - 3GB loads are safe, I would even do 10GB and still feel safe under the configuration I set up. The 2 3 GB loads just takes a lot of time and you need to babysit the loads as they complete unless a batch script (or load queuing), could be written within emplode or jemplode to do it. Idea for someone in the future I guess.


The database size was 27,541 files and 2696 folders. The majority of that is .wav files from my CD collection.

The first time I tried to load the whole database all at once.
That failed with multiple warnings. The warnings were related to the playlist directory and loading tunes. It finished within a few minutes. It didn't write the files, just completed with lots of errors.

If that is what you are trying to do, don't, it won't work. Created new drives for safety sake.

I tried to load 77GB the first time. Worked fine.
I tried to load 93GB for the second load. Worked fine.
I completed the load with 185GB. Worked fine.
This was all completed within 5 days.

After the load, the tags were not there, no database, nor playlist again. Used Roger's instructions again, we're good now. BTW - I forgot to do the CTRL+C & 'rom' last time and it trashed the system on the next power cycle of the player. Had to start over, hence the recent large download again.


I know, everyone is saying I shouldn't do that and it that really degrades the life of the drives. I'm sure it does, these WD 250GB drive pair has a lot of life on them already. If I lose them it's alright. I have very controlled circumstances for these loads.

As I mentioned before, I have the top removed, the room temp is less than 70 degrees F, and I have a temperature sensor right in the middle of each drive tracking the temperature of the drives. I never logged a temperature greater than 92 degrees F (delta of 22 degrees F) for either of the drives during the whole time. The ambient never exceeded 71.3 degrees.

By the way, the drives in play hover around 80 degrees to 87 degrees F. So I thought it was okay under the controlled circumstances. It has been playing .wav files for the last hour and the highest temperature of either drive is 86.1 degrees F. Ambient air is 70.2 degrees F (delta of 15.9 Degrees F). I'll get a measurement with the cover on sometime and report that as well.

What it does tell me about the player is the player drives can run for a long time, the Player has a very robust power supply, the external power supply is robust, the WD 250GB drives run solid, and system signal integrity seems very good. The ethernet seems fine, although I'm still not quite sure why there are the nearly constant collisions - my thought there is still drive rotational latency and TCP/IP throttling. I wonder if it could be the power-down crap on the WD 2TB Green Drives causing this as well? Would like another opinion on that one.

What it tells me about my host system is very similar. The drives in my system are the new WD 2TB Green EADS drives. They seem to be fine. Lots of dedicated time on them now.

Don't know about adding more memory, I did ask for a way that we can see what size is required so that we can right-size the ReserveCache or if necessary add more memory. No response yet. I think the memory chips are scarce.

Later.

Ross

Yes it is....

Partition check:
hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4
RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 320 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
empeg-pump v0.03 (19980601)
Press Ctrl-A to enter pump...VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
change_root: old root has d_count=1
Trying to unmount old root ... okay
Freeing unused kernel memory: 4k initempeg init 0.8
I see this is a developer image!
Mounting proc
Mounting first music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19
Mounting second music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hdc4 but got error 6
Error mounting partitions (possibly already mounted)
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
No secondary hard diskStarting player
Timezone: EST
Hijack: intercepting config.ini

Hi,

From the Empeg FAQ:
---------------------------------------------------------------
Why do I get an error message about reiserfs?
(Entry last updated on March 25th, 2004)
If you look at the player's boot up messages closely, you might see a line similar to this:

Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19

This is a normal status message that appears on every player on every boot up. It does not indicate a problem or an error of any kind. Please pay it no attention.

---------------------------------------------------------------
It's normal.


The "Tried to mount /dev/hdc4 but got error 6" is normal for a single drive player too. This is confirmed in "No secondary hard disk" message.

Have you checked to see if you have playlists and database files in /empeg/var ?

Ross

How do I do that? I typed that in to the hyperterminal and all it said was this is a directory! I don't know anything about hyperterminal commands.

Hi,

Insure the player drives have stopped spinning then disconnect the power plug from the empeg.

With the serial cable connected and a Hyper Terminal running, plug the power connector into the player. Allow it to boot and display the boot messages as you have in the past. I usually let it complete the boot even if it takes a while due to a hosed database. One quick identifier is the player display will show that it is rebuilding the database and either stays there or goes blank if you have a screen timout running. It will not pass through the radio messages. Follow the steps below:


---------
STEP 1. :
---------

When the boot is complete, type the following:

q


The player should respond with the following:
---------------------------------------------
Restored terminal settings
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Player exited normally: 0
Switching to shell-player loop
Starting bash.
empeg:/empeg/bin#


---------
STEP 2. :
---------

Then type:

cd /empeg/var
ls -la

The expected response should be:
--------------------------------
total 3580
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 4096 Sep 17 21:37 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 0 0 4096 Sep 10 22:14 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 229 Sep 14 02:59 config.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 3514373 Sep 17 21:36 database
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 119236 Sep 17 21:37 playlists
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 376 Sep 17 21:36 tags
empeg:/empeg/var#


You will notice that there are 4 files listed above. They are config.ini, database, playlists, and tags. My tags files are quite small because I have deleted most of the tag data and renamed the file-name include what I need.

My format is: xx - Song Title Artist Album


If you only see config.ini and not the other files (like I have had trouble with), you need to rebuild the database, playlists and tags. See the example below...

Example of an incorrect repsonse:
---------------------------------
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 4096 Aug 31 18:07 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 0 0 4096 Aug 23 15:30 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 614 Aug 31 17:51 config.ini
empeg:/empeg/var#


If all of the files are there (which I doubt because it can't find the tags - they could also be corrupted too), someone else might need to help. Roger recommended deleting the files and forcing a rebuild. Don't delete the config.ini file.

If the files are not there, proceed to the next step.


---------
STEP 3. :
---------

Since you only have 1 drive (2 drives require an additional command substituting drive0 with drive1), type the following:

mount -n -o remount,rw,nocheck /drive0


Then type:

Ctrl+D (Hold the Ctrl key down then depress the "D" key, sometimes referred to as CTRL^D). If too much information, I apologize. This forces the player to rebuild the files on its own.


Wait for the player to build the database, playlists, and tags files. This may (will for large databases), take a few minutes.


---------
STEP 4. :
---------

Verify that it comes back with the following after the rebuild:

Example of a similar correct completion response:
-------------------------------------------------
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Jul 5 2004
Vcb: 0x4086d000


---------
STEP 5. :
---------

Ctrl+C (sometimes referred to as CTRL^C) to stop the player.


Then type to make the drive(s) read only:

rom


---------
STEP 6. :
---------

Allow the player drives to spin down and remove the Power plug connector from the player. Re-insert it to reboot the player.

It should boot and operate correctly.


---------
STEP 7. :
---------

If you want to verify the rebuilt files are there, type the following again:


q

cd /empeg/var
ls -la


You should see the rebuilt files as shown in the correct response in STEP 2. (with different file sizes for your music database, playlists and tags).



If this doesn't work for you, you're going to have to call in the big guns (the 50+ calibre guys not a 9mm guy like me).

At this point you may have to repeat this procedure if it doesn't rebuild the files after loading them into the Player. I have had to do it a couple of times now. Not exactly sure why.

Let us know how this works for you.

Special thanks to Roger, Mark Lord, Peter, & Tony Fabris for their contributions to helping us to sort all of this out. To those who designed (hardware, software, mechanical, etc.), it in the first place too. Being an Engineer, I know how difficult that can be even with High-Rel components and top notch personnel.

We are in your debt. The Player still thrives a decade after its release. Now someone will just have to remind me... how long was this product expected to last?


Ross

that clears it up a little, I have used the hyperterminal to rebuild the partitions if I had a synch fail or had to pull the plug during a sync.

Since I rebuilt the hdd and am starting from scratch that doesn't really help me now but it may come in handy down the road. thanks again for helping to explain it.