Beta 1 will be released to the alpha test team tonight, and if they don't break it horribly it will go public on Monday. If they do break it horribly, we might release their home addresses to the BBS *grin*

To maximise the anticipation, I've decided to post the release notes to the BBS. This will give you time to familiarise yourselves with the new feature list - and hopefully persuade you that we haven't just made the whole thing up!

Enjoy.

Rio Car Beta Release 05-October-2001
Version 2.00-beta1

Copyright (c) SONICblue, Inc. 2001


* Notes

This is a Rio Car beta release. BY DEFINITION, BETA SOFTWARE MAY NOT
PERFORM AS ADVERTISED. It may not be stable. It may eat your music
and spoil your day in any number of ways. Please do not install this
release unless you understand these important points.

Release 2.0 has been in development for many months. These notes are
by no means comprehensive, if you notice a significant new feature that
isn't mentioned then please let us know so we can add it to the list.


* General

Please submit bugs to [email protected] - preferably after reading
the BBS (http://empeg.comms.net) to check that the bug has not already
been discussed.

Release notes are not cumulative. If you are upgrading by more than one
release then please read each set of release notes.


* Installation

Download either the consumer or developer images and emplode (or emptool)
from the empeg-car upgrades site.

You should install the new emplode or emptool before installing this
release. If you fail to do so your empeg-car unit may not function and it
will be necessary to apply the upgrade again using the correct version of
empegUpgrade or upgclient.

We strongly recommend completely de-installing the previous emplode before
installing the new one, which installs into a different location.

Connect your computer to your empeg car using the supplied serial cable.
Switch off your player at the wall or unplug the IEC cable from the brick
power supply.

The upgrade can be installed by serial only. Run the Upgrade Wizard and
either enter or browse for the upgrade file. Click Next and select the
serial port that your unit is connected to. Click Next again.

When instructed to do so by the upgrade program re-apply power to your
player by switching it on at the wall or connecting the IEC cable and brick
power supply. If you have an all-in-one power supply then switch it on at
the wall if possible or plug into the wall. The upgrade should then be
applied. If it fails, try again.


* What's New Since 1.03 - Player

NB: Features which require a real time clock may not work on Mk.1 players.

MP3 playback is now done using the ARM decoder. There should be little in
the way of audible difference but the VBR support is much improved, and
certain tracks that would not play before may now play.

WAV files are supported.

WMA files are supported, apart from DRM encrypted files.

Significant improvements to caching performance (turn on the disk
indicator to see this in action).

Gapless playback of properly-constructed MP3 files has been improved. Note
that this is dependent upon how the MP3s were created - most MP3 encoders
will add artificial silence to the beginning and end of each track as it
is being created. The car player will no longer insert its own gaps between
two consecutive tracks on playback.

Play counts and last played times have been implemented.

The running order and programme are now preserved over synchronise
operations.

Three bookmarks may now be stored and restored.

Repeat modes are now selectable from the player itself. An "r" (repeat all)
or "R" (repeat track) appears in Track info modes.

Tracks can now be marked for attention on the player. This is done by
pressing "7" on a Kenwood remote or "Mark" on a Rio remote. The function
is also available from the Bookmarks menu (we're looking for a more logical
home for it). Marked tracks appear in emplode with a distinguishing icon,
and can be a search criteria.

It is now possible to toggle timecode display modes by pressing "1" on the
remote. It is marked with "Time" on the Rio remote. Display modes are:
- Time of Day
- Track Elapsed
- Track Remaining
- Total Elapsed
- Playlist Elapsed
- Playlist Remaining
- Playlist Elapsed / Remaining
A number followed by "d" indicates days (!).

Balance, beep volume, and loudness are now remembered separately for in-car
and in-home use.

Several alternative shuffle behaviours have been added..
- Random: As before
- Least often played: Tracks played less often will tend toward the start
- Least recently played: Tracks played less recently will do as above
- By year: There will be an approximate progression through history
- Off: As before

Toggling shuffle with the remote will switch between no shuffle and the
last shuffle mode selected. When shuffle is active an "S" is shown on
the Track info screen.

Shuffling the running order is now much less likely to glitch the audio.

When selecting tracks to play using the musical note icon only the tracks
are played, not the playlists.

It is now possible to skip tracks/fast forward/rewind while the disk is
spun down with the UI not hanging.

Soft power on/off now works during synchronise.

It is no longer possible for the player to pick the wrong menu item if an
item is selected very quickly after moving to it.

Wendy filters have been implemented. These provide a means to completely
hide content on a player, for example if your mother is in the car.
Filters can be combined for more advanced applications. They are defined
from within emplode. An 'F' appears in track details view if a Wendy
Filter is active.

A new "hush" mode has been added which reduces the volume by a configurable
(from emplode) amount rather than muting it completely. This is achieved
by holding the pause button on the Rio remote (there is no Kenwood
equivalent). An 'H' appears in track details view if Hush is active.

A detailed info screen is now available for tracks. Press and hold the
"Info" button on the Rio remote to see this screen. Not available on the
Kenwood remote.

Pressing the rotary knob now toggles through the various Sound menu
settings (Volume, Balance, etc).

The external mute line can now be configured (from emplode) to cause mute,
pause or hush.

A large number of new visuals have been added, and existing visuals have
been enhanced. Note that there are random elements which reseed from time
to time, so any one visual could have several random looks.

Implemented visuals for Aux-In and Tuner.

A transient line info visual has been added which appears and disappears in
a "Top of the Pops"(tm) style. The graphical visual behind it squashes into
the remaining space rather than clipping. The timecode pops up in isolation
when scanning within a track.

Volume now ramps up gradually at startup when in the car to avoid pain the
morning after the heavy night before. This can be configured from emplode.

DHCP client now does uPnP address allocation in parallel with normal DHCP.
This means it can be plugged directly into a PC with no network setup (ie,
set to "automatic") and ethernet will work.

Time zone now works correctly.

Position is remembered in playlist menus - press and hold the playlist menu
item to return to previous level. This does not currently work across
reboots.

Minor UI enhancements, e.g. round corners of menus.

Added support for insert/appending to playlist when the menu button
is held in the playlist hierarchy. A submenu opens with the appropriate
options.

Added insert as well as append during search. Use "Select Mode" on the Rio
remote or "CDMDCH" on the Kenwood. Multiple insert operations will insert
after the last inserted item, not just after the current play position,
allowing proper cueing of new tracks

Improved download efficiency.

Implemented Hate Music buttons - press and hold the appropriate remote
tweak function to remove tracks from the running order. e.g. If a
Britney track comes on, press and hold Artist (2 on Kenwood) to remove
all further Britney tracks from the running order.

Aux-In detects track transitions, and guesses at track numbers and
timecode.

Fixed the cumulative duration calculations.

The visuals information is now updated via RDS if the selected
channel is FM.

The EQ UI has been changed to allow more features and make things a little
easier for the user. In particular:
- The settings that used to live in the centre of the display have been
moved into a menu structure. Access this by pressing left/right until the
preset name is highlighted in the top centre of the screen, then press down.
- This menu also includes a "copy from" feature for copying entire presets
- The number keys 1-9 select the the n-th band, or the n-th preset
- The rotary can be used to adjust levels, and can be pressed to select
gain/freq/Q adjustment
- Saving has been made automatic

The powerfail indicator now stays on the screen for as long as the voltage
is beneath the threshold.

Long track names now scroll in info screens.

Search By Playlist has been implemented.

When you un-shuffle, the player will properly un-shuffle "around" your current
tune according to the order of the playlists you've specified in Emplode. If
you want the player to always "un-shuffle around the current track" so that
you're dropped into that track's album, then make sure your album trees are
listed first in Emplode (based on the Position column).


* What's New Since 1.03 - Emplode

(emplode has been completely rewritten, what follows is far from
comprehensive. Please refer to the built in help.)

New player discovery dialog, which continuously monitors for players on
the enabled interfaces.

The tree includes views by Artist, Genre, All Tracks and so forth. Tracks
are automatically sorted into these views.

Tracks no longer have to exist within playlists. All tracks on the player
are shown in various views from the tree, of which Playlists is one option.
If a track is erased from all playlists it will not be removed from the
player - this will only happen when it is erased from one of the fixed
views. In future it will be made more obvious to the user whether they
are erasing a reference to a track, or removing the content entirely.

Implemented "emplode today" HTML view. This is the first view presented
when a player is connected, and provides some useful links. Tunes can be
dragged & dropped onto HTML view (in which case they will not be added to
any playlist and will be accessible only from within searches - in future
the emplode tree structure will be recreated on the player).

Now allows drag and drop onto "Artists", "Albums", etc in which case the tags
will be updated appropriately. This is useful for mass retagging of tracks
using multiple views.

Tracks can be dropped onto the player icon in the tree, in which case they
are added as content but not added to any playlists.

It is now possible to scroll whilst dragging and dropping.

A search capability has been added with both simple and advanced
interfaces. Advanced searches can be saved to disk.

Dragging and dropping from Search results onto the tab control switches
tab appropriately.

Wendy filters have been implemented.

The free disk space tracking code in emplode is much better, in particular
it now copes with deletions.

Files already on the player can now be trawled automatically to fill in
extra information (such as codec, bitrate etc. information) that has been
supported for newly added files since before v1.0.

Dropping files is now much more user friendly. Items dropped are now sorted
alphabetically by filename.

Implemented Yes to All confirmation in appropriate dialogs.

Dragging an item from the search results onto the tab control in emplode
now switches tabs.

Implemented context menu in RHS views in Emplode.

Implemented redirector URL for product support.

Users can now name AUX channel in emplode, to match whatever hardware you
might have attached.

The volume can be capped at 0dB from emplode.

The Kenwood remote control can be disabled from emplode, to prevent clashes
with other Kenwood head units in the vehicle. The Rio remote uses different
(unique to Rio) codes.

Implemented buttons to allow reordering of tracks.

Group-editing multiple selections has been implemented. For instance, you can
group-select ten tracks, get their properties, and change their Artist field
in a single operation.


Rob Voisey 2001/10/05 20:12 +0100 (BST)
[email protected]

"Top of the Pops"(tm)

And whats the story behind this one?

Top of the Pops is a pop music chart show on British TV (BBC1 to be precise):

Top of the Pops

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

...wow!...

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (96GB Smoke)
SN# 030103046 (10GB Blue - Emergency Spare)

Can't wait!

Tony, what was the feature that made you drool and type a note in all caps???

- Jon

I think this will be the first time I've wanted the weekend to finish just so's it can be Monday again Can't wait to play with this puppy

Marcus (beaker)
32 gig (various colours)

The anticipation will be awful, but what a great way to make my weekend seem like forever...

-Doug
Mk2-12G Blue (Now A/R Green)

Wow great, but I wonder:

.... A new "hush" mode has been added which reduces the volume by a configurable
(from emplode) amount rather than muting it completely. This is achieved
by holding the pause button on the Rio remote (there is no Kenwood
equivalent). An 'H' appears in track details view if Hush is active....

Does this feature have a command for it on the serial port??

...A detailed info screen is now available for tracks. Press and hold the
"Info" button on the Rio remote to see this screen. Not available on the
Kenwood remote....

Does this mean that these features are not available when I only have the
Kenwood remote??

....Implemented visuals for Aux-In and Tuner....

Does this work for the MKI as well??

TommyE

Since its my job to complain...

Lots of features that require a Rio remote.

No Rio remotes @ the store.

Do we have an ETA for Rio remotes @ the store?

D

Tony, what was the feature that made you drool and type a note in all caps?

Anyone want to hazard a guess?

___________
Tony Fabris

Wow wow Wow! (and that's only after reading the first three lines!

I think I am gonig to need training to get full use out of this!

Is there a part in the FAQ that describes the "auto" listing of tracks not in playlsts? For example, I have an "Artists" playlist. Within that, I have "#-C" "D-F" "G-I" etc etc. In each of those is the appropriate artist and within artists are the albums or individual tracks. So emplode can automatically create this? Can it be customized?

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

Is there a part in the FAQ that describes the "auto" listing of tracks not in playlsts?

There's no FAQ entry for it, and you don't need one. When you see it, it will be self-explanatory.

Just so you don't panic now, here's how it works:

Your playlists are there, as they always have been. Nothing has changed about your playlists, how you organize them, or how you use them.

But... Playlists are no longer the only thing you see in emplode. Now, in addition to the playlists, there is a whole other set of trees. These trees categorize all the tracks based on their tag data. There is a new Artists tree, a new Genres tree, a new Albums tree, etc. These are totally unrelated to your playlists. They are simply a different way to look at your tag data. Internally, these new trees are affectionately known as the "soup" views if I'm not mistaken.

You could, for example, have put David Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans" into your Nine Inch Nails playlist. This is fine, and this would not change. However, if the Artist field for that track says David Bowie, then that track will show up under David Bowie in the new Artists tree.

At the moment, if you've got tracks in your Soup views that haven't been put into a playlist, there's no way to play them from the player's front panel. The player only has an option to play playlists at the current time (so you still need to have at least one playlist for anything you want to listen to).

Eventually, the player will allow you to see and play from the Soup trees via a new menu item. This has not been implemented yet. When it does get implemented, it will make it so that you don't need to create playlists if you don't want to. You will be able to Play By Artist/Play All with zero playlists on the unit. For those that own a Rio Receiver, you have already seen how this works so you know what it will be like.

The only thing this really changes now is: If you delete a track from a playlist, it does not disappear from the player. It's still there in the Soup views. If you want to get rid of the track completely, then delete it from the Soup view and it'll go away for good. Note that this feature now makes the "Unattached Items" folder obsolete. There is no longer an Unattached Items folder visible in Emplode. Everything that would have gone into Unattached items now appears in at least one or more Soup views.

Clear as mud?

___________
Tony Fabris

WOW! Cool feature setup. Can't wait to try this out!

But eh...wasn't the player going to support 100base/T ethernet also? Or have I got my wires crossed?

Riocar 10gig (for now) S/N : 10101747 red

Unless I'm very much mistaken the actual player hardware would have to be changed for this to be implemented.

Marcus (beaker)
32 gig (various colours)

But eh...wasn't the player going to support 100base/T ethernet also?

I started laughing when I read that, then I realized there was a chance you might not be joking about it.

In case you aren't joking:

100baseT ethernet isn't something you can update with a software change. In order to do 100baseT ethernet, it would need some special hardware on the player's motherboard. Among the things needed would be a 100baseT ethernet chip set, and a PCI data bus to support that chip set. The car player has neither.

If you were joking, then my reply is as follows:

"They had to leave that one out along with the Cure For World Hunger feature."

___________
Tony Fabris

"They had to leave that one out along with the Cure For World Hunger feature."

Well, I guess Etheopia (sp?) isn't going to buy up the last batch of Rio players then!

Relax guys, it was a joke. At first I was going to say firewire implementation instead of 100base-T, but then I thought that would've been TOO obvious!


Riocar 10gig (for now) S/N : 10101747 red

yeah, yeah, yeah, of course you were joking. we believe you, honest.

Marcus (beaker)
32 gig (various colours)

Tracks can be dropped onto the player icon in the tree, in which case they
are added as content but not added to any playlists.

so they're invisible on the player?

Now allows drag and drop onto "Artists", "Albums", etc in which case the tags
will be updated appropriately. This is useful for mass retagging of tracks
using multiple views.

Entirly too intuative!

Volume now ramps up gradually at startup when in the car to avoid pain the
morning after the heavy night before. This can be configured from emplode.

YES YES YES!!!

This is the greatest update I've ever seen! Seriously, Most manufacturers would charge for a featureupdate like this, and I would have no problem with it.
Is the User manula being re-written to account for all of this features and functions? It just blows all the competition away. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it slashdotters. Build your system for less and tell me how long it takes to create such a useful feature set in software. HAH!

congrat's guys! Rio, really doesn't know what they're doing with this EOL thing.

C'mon Monday!!

Murray
Go-Wit-Da-Fro

> so they're invisible on the player?

Currently, they only show up in Search results on the player. In a (not too distant) future release, the pre-sorted tree structure from emplode (by Artist, Genre, Year, Playlists etc) will also appear on the player as a menu hierarchy.

In many cases playlists will no longer be the primary (or most convenient) way to access your music. Of course there's nothing stopping you using them in exactly the same way you do now if you want to.

> Is the User manula being re-written to account for all of this features and functions?

Unfortunately we don't have access to our Tech Writers as the product is now EOL, however I have the source for the electronic version of the manual and plan to update it when I get time. If some owners (probably Alpha Team people) are willing to help out and speed up the process then I'd be happy to share the task.

Rob

Hmm, they certainly SEEM to be at the store (both stores in fact)... a few people have posted here saying they've placed orders... I'm not saying you're wrong, but what makes you think they're not available?

Rob

Ah, I see that after adding the product to the cart it shows out of stock. I'll look into that next week.

Rob

Put one in my cart. Cart says:

1 - - Rio Car Remote - - Out Of Stock - - 29.95

If they're IN stock, then the store needs updating.

> Does this feature have a command for it on the serial port??

Probably not, but it's a reasonable suggestion.

> Does this mean that these features are not available when I only have the
> Kenwood remote??

Yes. The Kenwood remote doesn't have press-and-hold capability on all of the buttons, so some features are available only from the Rio remote.

> Does this work for the MKI as well??

Hmm, I'm pretty sure that it won't. The Mk.2 has an extra chip that allows us to sample the aux and tuner sources.

Rob

If some owners (probably Alpha Team people) are willing to help out and speed up the process then I'd be happy to share the task.

(/Tony quietly ducks out of the room.)


___________
Tony Fabris

Eeeen stock, out of stock. Zeees means nothing. Dahlink!

I ordered a fascia kit from DR that showed "out of stock" for 2-3 days before I ordered it and for at least a week after I received it (very quickly, I might add).

So, I think the rational answer is.... place your Visa offering on the altar of Rio Digitalis then drop back 10 yards and pray.

V2 looks great, BTW

Jim

Oh my God! That feature list is soooooooooo awesome... I bet you, had that been the feature list 3 months ago, you wouldn't have been able to manufacture RioCars fast enough to even worry about the cost of retooling.


Tom

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

Hi !

what about the possibility to turn on the clock-related features on a mk1-version via config.ini ?
on every startup my mk1 got the time from GPS.

please .... :-)


bobo

OK... ordered it. Also picked up a set of colored screens (since its EOL, and I might some day move the unit to a car with a different color dash)

Rob... what was the story on the mounts... are those likely to be around and available for a while, or are those "while supplies last" type of thing....?

D

Am I mistaken or wasn't there supposed to be a new plugin feature that let us put in our own visuals in addition to the standard ones.

Steve

Mark I / #102 / 48g / Smoke / Custom Fascia
Best PC/Audio Investment Ever Made

Unfortunately we don't have access to our Tech Writers as the product is now EOL, however I have the source for the electronic version of the manual and plan to update it when I get time. If some owners (probably Alpha Team people) are willing to help out and speed up the process then I'd be happy to share the task.

Hey, Tony may have bailed on you, but I'd be willing to help out with the docs. It's been too long since I've had a good Tech Writing project...I could use the practice.

BTW- I didn't see a mention of the "Replace Track" function in the release notes. Did that not make the cut?

-Zandr
Mk.I #0150 10GB
RioCar #010101243 10GB (96GB here I come...)

No, that's something that has been talked about pretty much since the 1st Mk.1 shipped but it hasn't been scheduled for any specific release yet.

Rob

I don't think it would have made much (any) difference to sales. The feature list was already incredible compared with anything else in the market.

Rob

Hmm.. I think that feature might well be in there. As the release notes said, there is a LOT of stuff in emplode that isn't in the release notes at the moment. It's been completely rewritten from scratch.

Rob

I don't know how many the eStore have at the moment, but I have about 200 mounts in Cambridge awaiting wiring looms. The looms have been ordered and are due for delivery any day.

Rob

yum.

(O|||||O)

Surely the additional info screens and such are available in the menu structure...

Fly me to the moon...

Aux-In detects track transitions, and guesses at track numbers and
timecode?

or was it something else? I'm curious, what was it?

John

30 GB - Mk2a (Rio Car) - BLUE / RED

It was the Gapless playback.

Whenever I rip a continuous-track album, I always trim the files with GapKiller so that they sound right in WinAmp with the gapless output plug-in. I've gone to a lot of trouble with my collection to ensure this.

The xaudio engine in 1.0x always had a tiny pause between two songs. Just enough so that you could hear it if you were listening closely. So all the work I did with GapKiller was never realized on the car player.

I don't know if it was due to the work of the empeg guys, or if this is built into the new ARM engine, but now there is no pause of any kind between two tracks with 2.0.

So suddenly all of my collection plays gapless now. Well, at least as well as it can considering the source material and the trimming I had to do to the files. It sounds exactly like the gapless output plugin in WinAmp: 90 percent of my hand-trimmed track transitions are perfectly seamless. The remainder are so close that you don't notice it unless you're trying really hard.

I can listen to Dark Side of the Moon again.

___________
Tony Fabris

So we need the Rio remote for some of the new features

How does the Kenwood KCA-RC600 compare to the rio remote? I know it's supposed to do everything the kenwood credit card remote does, except for 1 button.

I hate the credit card remotes. We need a squishy-button style remote.

MP3 playback is now done using the ARM decoder. There should be little in
the way of audible difference.....

May I ask how it was decoded before and/or the difference?

WMA files are supported, apart from DRM encrypted files.

Pardon my ignorance but what is DRM encrypted?
Nevermind found it here if anyone else likes to know.

Thanks.

#695-Mk2/8 colors-12Gig w/Tuner- awaits v2.x & Voice Recog.

Edited by jwickis on 07/10/01 12:08 AM.

The decoder used in 1.0 was XAudio. The ARM decoder is more convenient for us under the hood in a number of ways, and is better optimised for the ARM processor (as you would expect). It also has fewer problems handling VBR files.

Rob

Yes, there are very few features which are entirely inaccessible without a Rio remote.

Rob

"The xaudio engine in 1.0x always had a tiny pause between two songs. Just enough so that you could hear it if you were listening closely. So all the work I did with GapKiller was never realized on the car player."


so that explains why your gap killer program didn't work when I tried it

32Gig MK2 In 2001 VW Golf TDI

This new ARM decoder, is that based on the IPP libraries? I was doing some research into some ARM development and I noticed Intel has a sample program that plays MP3's. I wasn't able to get it working on the Empeg (it compiled but it couldn't find the audio device.) I was just curious as to if the new decoder is based on this, and if so, if CPU consumption is reduced at all since they're Intel libraries.

-Tony
MkII #554

No, I believe it's based on Franhoffer and heavily optimised by ARM.

Rob

Hi all....

I remember some time ago the need for a one time database "conversation" for enabling the new features when upgrading to 2.x was mentioned. Is this still the case and if so is there a way to go back to 1.03 after this "conservation" has been done ?

Just thinking of loosing my large database due to bugs in 2.0 Beta 1? And BETAs are supposed to have bugs :-)))) I would like to avoid Re-uploading of 30 GB MP3s ...... 8-P

How long will this process of "upgrading" or "converting" the database take ?

Janosch

Tony,

If I'd want gapless playback with some mp3's I've got over here, then do I have to re-rip the cd's and convert then with lame with some special parameter or something (I seem to remember reading something about that a while ago), or do files that have been ripped and encoded with any encoder or player automatically work?

If I have to re-rip them it's not that bad : I'm talking about 10 cd's max here.

Riocar 10gig (for now) S/N : 10101747 red

It's Monday here in NZ, 12:20AM....hmmm but it ain't anywhere else....Dammit...

The database is compatible between v1.x and v2.x. There is no conversion process.

Except: the play_count/last_played data format has changed. There is no conversion process for this either -- the counts will be reset to zero.

You can go back and forth between v1.x and v2.x without any problems -- except for the dynamic data, as mentioned.

We are not aware of any catastrophic bugs in v2.x that would require you to reload all 30Gb.

-- roger

so that explains why your gap killer program didn't work when I tried it

My GapKiller program came with specific instructions on how to make it work with WinAmp. The web page included a link to the Gapless Playback plugin for WinAmp. Nowhere in the Gapkiller instructions did I say it would work with the empeg car player.

However, with version 2.0 of the empeg software, it now works just as well with the Winamp Gapless Playback plugin and the empeg car player.

___________
Tony Fabris

If I'd want gapless playback with some mp3's I've got over here, then do I have to re-rip the cd's and convert then with lame with some special parameter or something

I haven't tried that version of LAME yet. As I understand it, it's not ready for prime time yet. I'm interested in seeing how it performs.

In the meantime, there are two ways you can get gapless playback:

1) Rip your entire album as one huge song into one single MP3 file. Then use a splitter utility to cut up the MP3 at song boundaries. My GapKiller program includes just such a splitter utility.

2) Hand-trim frames off of the beginning and end of your existing mp3 files to remove the silent bits. This requires some trial-and-error to find the right number of frames to trim. This is what GapKiller does.

___________
Tony Fabris

The only thing this really changes now is: If you delete a track from a playlist, it does not disappear from the player. It's still there in the Soup views. If you want to get rid of the track completely, then delete it from the Soup view and it'll go away for good. Note that this feature now makes the "Unattached Items" folder obsolete. There is no longer an Unattached Items folder visible in Emplode. Everything that would have gone into Unattached items now appears in at least one or more Soup views.

Oh, wait. Is there a way to differentiate those songs only in the soup tree from those that are also listed in the playlists tree?
I would not want songs to remain on the player if I decided to remove them from the playlists. And it would sure be a hassle to search through those automatically generated tree to find all the songs from a certain compilation CD I just deleted. At least if I would have to remove them from each branch of that tree.

cu,
sven

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

I would not want songs to remain on the player if I decided to remove them from the playlists.

There has been some discussion among the alpha team regarding this. I do not know if the current beta does this, but future plans call for a dialog box to appear if you've just deleted a song from the last playlist.

Keep in mind that someday soon, when you can play directly from a soup view, you might not want it to work this way.

___________
Tony Fabris

Maybe if when you delete a song from a playlist a dialog box pops up that asks you if you also want to take it out of the soup?

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

I don't remember reading that if wouldn't work on the empeg so I tried it :-). it didn't work with freeamp either I don't use winamp

I can't wait to try it with 2.0 player software

32Gig MK2 In 2001 VW Golf TDI

I don't use winamp (...) I can't wait to try it with 2.0 player software

One of the requirements of Gapkiller is that you need a gapless-playback program on the PC, Winamp is recommended because I supply the gapless playback plugin at my web site.

It's only useful if you can PREVIEW the trims, which is what gapkiller's primary purpose is. You have to do lots of trial-and-error work on each gap point, and if you don't have WinAmp with its gapless output plugin running, then you can't do that.

If you had to upload each trim to the empeg before listening to the gap, it would take approximately two hours to trim each song pair.

I recommend that you download Winamp, download the gapless-output plugin from my web site, and mess with it that way for a while. Once you've got the songs sounding right in WinAmp, then that's what they'll sound like on 2.0.


___________
Tony Fabris

Maybe if when you delete a song from a playlist a dialog box pops up that asks you if you also want to take it out of the soup?

I believe I just said that?


___________
Tony Fabris

I was using the newly added splitting program should I need to preview the tracks when using that ?

If I remember the instructions correctly with the splitting program I just needed to put in the start and ending times for each track. and there should be no space between the end of one track and the start of the next.

32Gig MK2 In 2001 VW Golf TDI

In reply to:

---

Gapless playback of properly-constructed MP3 files has been improved. Note
that this is dependent upon how the MP3s were created - most MP3 encoders
will add artificial silence to the beginning and end of each track as it
is being created. The car player will no longer insert its own gaps between
two consecutive tracks on playback.

---

This is great news! Now since it's a beta test I'll get to see if this is really implemented well. So here's what I will want answered, either by my own tests or from the people who might already know the answer.

Let's say I create a single, large MP3 file and split it into several pieces---for example, I encode an entire album and split the file into individual traks. Now suppose I play them in their original consecutive order on an empeg. Will it sound exactly as if the file was never split in the first place?

It is important to note that it is not sufficient to simply insure that the MP3 decoder does not insert any additional gaps between the MP3 files. An additional necessary condition is that the MP3 decoder's internal state is not reset between MP3 files, either. In other words, the computational section of the MP3 decoder must not even know where the file boundaries are. If the internal state of the MP3 decoder is reset between files, then a certain amount of information may be lost about the first few frames after a split.

As I have discussed in previous threads, this is the only practical way that I know of, for most if not all MP3 encoding engines, to insure true gapless playback: specifically, to encode an entire album as a single MP3 file, and then split the file along frame boundaries where the track boundaries are supposed to be.

Clearly, this is different from splitting the uncompressed .WAV file into pieces, and then encoding each one separately. One reason is somewhat obvious: if the length of a .WAV file is not an exact multiple of the MP3 frame size (1/75th of a second, I believe?) then silence will be inserted at the beginning or the end of the file to make it so. And yet, even careful, MP3-sensitive .WAV file splitting will not be enough: an MP3 encoder will often add additional silence to the beginning and/or the end of the file upon encoding despite this.

This is because each MP3 frame is not encoded independently of each other. So the sound produced during a particular MP3 frame depends upon the frames that surround it. Put another way, some of the information used to create the sound in a given MP3 frame is placed before or after that frame in the file. If this information would then run off the end of the file, blank space is inserted there to hold it.

So, the question is: will 2.00 pass this test---if not now, by the release? I am truly excited that it can!

Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266

In reply to:

---

2) Hand-trim frames off of the beginning and end of your existing mp3 files to remove the silent bits. This requires some trial-and-error to find the right number of frames to trim. This is what GapKiller does.

---

Tony,

I believe that it's this second method that is the reason you may be getting only 90% effectiveness with your gapless playback instead of 100%. The problem is that these "silent" frames can actually contain information necessary to fully decode previous or following frames (I can't remember which). So trimming away the silent frames may cause you to lose some of audible information. The degree to which this matters will certainly depend on the source material. I've actually seen this audible information in otherwise silent MP3 frames by examining them with a hex editor.

As far as I know, your first technique is the only one that can be guaranteed to preserve all the musical content:

In reply to:

---

1) Rip your entire album as one huge song into one single MP3 file. Then use a splitter utility to cut up the MP3 at song boundaries. My GapKiller program includes just such a splitter utility.

---

But of course, I don't yet know if the new empeg decoder handles MP3 file boundaries in a fashion which will preserve this cross-file musical information.

Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266

"Three bookmarks may now be stored and restored. "

what's a bookmark ? marking a spot in a playlist maybe ?

32Gig MK2 In 2001 VW Golf TDI

"This is because each MP3 frame is not encoded independently of each other. "

Yes, this is the bit reservoir(sp?). It carries some info from frame to frame.

A patch was recently committed to fix --nogap in the most recent lame alpha builds. I'll give it a shot tomorrow and report on how it turns out with 2.0.

Sean

what's a bookmark ? marking a spot in a playlist maybe ?

Essentially, you can keep three playlists around and switch between them, remembering the content and position for each. You can keep one for, let's say audiobooks, one for your music choice and one for your SO's music choice. I imagine you can also have a scratch playlist that you don't save, for instance for when demo'ing the player or with guests in the car.

If you're on a quest to hear every track on the player, you currently lose your position in the playlist (and if it was shuffled play there's no way to get back that precise order) if someone makes a new search or selects another playlist - bookmarks solve this.

/Michael

Great feature list, will you offer classes for that :-)
Some question though, there was some talk a quick access method to 'consumer' treble/bass/balance sound control might be implemented by pressing the rotary button during play ?

Was there any other meaningful function implemented for the rotary button ?

Do the left/right buttons still adjuste volume while pressed ?

BTW, is there a way playlist browsing could pick up at the point it was left the last time accessed ? It's annoying to navigate through the whole tree all the time if I just want to get one tree level back for e.g. another CD of the same artist.

Other than that, cant wait to see the new visuals and all that.

Keep our mouths' watered...Cheers, Slug

But of course, I don't yet know if the new empeg decoder handles MP3 file boundaries in a fashion which will preserve this cross-file musical information.

We will see soon, but I don't think it does. To do that properly, the decoder should know when to reset its internal state at the beginning of the new tune and when not, and we have not heard of any new properties to flag a tune as 'continuous with the next one'. Am I right there, or do encoders 'return to neutral' at the end of MP3 files? If they do, then it would suffice never to reset the decoder: files made by cutting a large MP3 would play exactly as one, and in the case of independend files the 'leftover' from the first would not spoil the beginning of the next.

Of course, I am not quite sure I am making any sense here, knowing almost nothing about MP3 internals .

Guys@empeg?

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

From the release notes:

In reply to:

---

Position is remembered in playlist menus - press and hold the playlist menu item to return to previous level. This does not currently work across reboots.

---

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

I was using the newly added splitting program should I need to preview the tracks when using that ?

It helps, yes. As mcgrant says in his post to this thread, sometimes the bit reservior gets in the way, depending on how the playback software handles it.

I actually don't have any "Split" tracks on my empeg to test, I should probably play with that real quick to check...

___________
Tony Fabris

I believe that it's this second method that is the reason you may be getting only 90% effectiveness with your gapless playback instead of 100%. The problem is that these "silent" frames can actually contain information necessary to fully decode previous or following frames

Right, I'm aware of the bit reservior issue, and GapKiller does the best with what you've got. It currently does the only two possible things it can: A) trim existing frames via trial and error, B) split a single large MP3 cleanly at frame boundaries.

I don't think the playback of the Empeg Car 2.0 software attempts to preserve the bit reservoir across tracks, so even method B won't sound perfect. It's the correct behavior for a player to empty the bit reservior between tracks when it has no clue whether the material was supposed to be gapless or not.

All I'm saying is that the 2.0 software now sounds (to my ear) exactly like the WinAmp gapless playback plugin that I was using to begin with. In other words, it no longer has a tiny pause between two tracks as it sorts out the next song. It plays one track, then gets right on with the next one.

I'll play with some deliberately-split tracks and see how they sound on the 2.0 software..

___________
Tony Fabris

Okay, I played with some deliberately-split tracks and they sound exactly as you would expect them to sound if you dumped the bit reservior between two frames. There is the slightest tiniest glitch at the boundary, but there is no pause and no dropout. It sounds infinitely better than it did before 2.0, where there was an actual droput there (however small).

It's not perfect, but the glitch is so miniscule that you probably wouldn't notice it during regular listening. If it still bugs you, you can do my trial-and-error trimming method which will get you quite a bit closer to perfect.

Remember that the player has got NO CLUE that Track B is a continuation of Track A, and it's actually doing the Right Thing to dump the bit reservior and restart the decoder when it encounters a new track. If it didn't, then two disparate tracks would have a glitch at the boundary, and that's not good either. In fact, it would be worse. So I think the player is doing the Right Thing now. It's certainly doing the best it can with the material it's been given.

I'm not sure how the new version of LAME is going to handle those boundary points. I'm curious to see how the player software handles it. If LAME is able to make two tracks dovetail without the decoder having to do anything special other than play the two parts really close together, then the car player will do it flawlessly.



___________
Tony Fabris

what's a bookmark ? marking a spot in a playlist maybe ?

Yes, but it's more than that. It's a saving of the entire playlist state, including your current position within it.

___________
Tony Fabris

It's Monday.........

Waiting..............

MK2 Home made smoked 32Gb S/n 090000949

And with you the rest of the empeg community. I guess Rob is probably still typing the remaining 12 pages of the release notes

[email protected]
--------------------------------------
Reg:1934/Mk1:158-6Blue(sold)/Mk2:380-12Amber

Where is it? Where is it? I woke up an hour earlier, skipped breakfast to just keep on clicking on the refresh button, came to work in pijama for the same reason, breaking all speed limits, climbed up the stairs by car just to get to the office quicker, and still refreshing continuously... Help! I need it!
Ok, I was joking. The only serious part is that I need v. 2.0 to go back to normality, today...



Taym
_________________________
MK II BLUE/RED 12GB #923

You do have a new website to explore for now at least.
That should keep you busy for five or so minutes.

Where is it? Where is it? I woke up an hour earlier, skipped breakfast to just keep on clicking on the refresh button, came to work in pijama for the same reason, breaking all speed limits, climbed up the stairs by car just to get to the office quicker, and still refreshing continuously... Help! I need it!

I know, I know! Not only am I waiting for 2.0 but my Tuner is on a TNT van somewhere waiting to be delivered! Man is it frustrating.

Has anyone noticed how time appears to be running slower today for some reason?

ChrisTall
That really is my name!

Yes.....


And very nice it looks too.

Good effort chaps.

MK2 Home made smoked 32Gb S/n 090000949

Just saw it! Great job, bravo Drakino!
I registered, voted, browsed it all... WHat can I say, I love it! No need to say, if I can help I'll be happy too.
The problem is: I already browsed it three times, and 2.0 has not been released yet... Don't know what else to do!!

Taym
_________________________
MK II BLUE/RED 12GB #923

C'mon Rob

Stop teasing....

MK2 Home made smoked 32Gb S/n 090000949

I can see them over there in Cambridge, checking the BBS and laughing at every single comment of ours...
"Shell we upload it?"
"No, let's wait a little bit more..."


Taym
_________________________
MK II BLUE/RED 12GB #923

I presume that it will eventually turn up in the Beta software page.

I hope that I am constantly refreshing the right page???

MK2 Home made smoked 32Gb S/n 090000949

He Rob, in France it's 13:00.

I AM HUNGRY ......

Will you feed our Appetite .....



Empeg II - 10 Gb - Red Fascia - 750 Songs -

- I Will Strike From the Grey -

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the tuner functions will be enhanced with v2, or did I dream that? Something about Traffic Announcements and automagically choosing the strongest signal for a particular radio station (is that called EON or something?)

yeah - good point!
is it this url? http://www.empeg.com/cgi-bin/display.cgi?section=downloads&id=4

TeeMcBee
Mk2, # 080000143, 12+30 GB, Tuner Module

Yea, but over here in NZ it's already Tuesday!! 9/10/2001 1:20am, I bin refeshing ALL day, and now I'm exhusted. Well better sleep, the quicker it's morning the quicker I can start refreshing again.

p.s. tis my birthday on Wednesday, can I get a early present...Rob..hint...hint.... :)

That is where I would expect it (and have been refreshing my browser)

-Doug
Mk2-12G Blue (Now A/R Green)

That's where I'm looking. No Joy yet though...

MK2 Home made smoked 32Gb S/n 090000949

"There are no files in this section. " =

-Doug
Mk2-12G Blue (Now A/R Green)

I bet the file IS there but they forgot to update the page


MK2 Home made smoked 32Gb S/n 090000949

I don't have the latest info, but if the beta is ready for public release, then it will probably be late Monday or the early hours of Tuesday morning (UK time) before it's available.

--
David
// I'm probably not speaking on behalf of empeg/SONICblue here...

In reply to:

---

Maybe if when you delete a song from a playlist a dialog box pops up that asks you if you also want to take it out of the soup?

I believe I just said that?

---

Tony, you [bold]kinda[/bold] just said that. You described having a dialogue box appear when you are deleteing a track from it's final appearance in a playlist. I suggested that everytime you delete a track, you are asked if you want to delete that one instance of the track, or delete all occurances of that track (playlists and soup). Mine might be a little more annoying because it would appear all the time, but it would be more useful when you wanted to completely remove a track.

Did I miss it, or is search impletemented in emplode?

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

robert taylor said:

"--nogap is the same as making one big mp3 file with the encoder and then splitting it youself on mp3 frame bounderies. --nogap has one extra nicety in that it will reset the bitreservoir at track bounderies, so the first frame of all the mp3 files will be valid when played back by itself.

For nogap to work in a player with a play list of the 10 mp3 files, the player just needs to not reset the encoding engine between each mp3 file. (and hope that the sample rate and number of channels is not changing from one mp3 file to the next). If you add tags (id3 or vbr header) the decoder also has to have the logic to look for and remove these tags when going from one mp3 file to the next. So a simple "gapless plugin" which just sends the playlist to the decoder as a single mp3 stream will decode the vbr headers as 20ms of silence."

In reply to:

---

A patch was recently committed to fix --nogap in the most recent lame alpha builds. I'll give it a shot tomorrow and report on how it turns out with 2.0.

---

Oh, now this would be great! If that works as expected, then gapless playback will work for sure as long as you make sure that the .WAV files are multiples of the MP3 frame length.

Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266

In reply to:

---

Remember that the player has got NO CLUE that Track B is a continuation of Track A, and it's actually doing the Right Thing to dump the bit reservior and restart the decoder when it encounters a new track. If it didn't, then two disparate tracks would have a glitch at the boundary, and that's not good either. In fact, it would be worse. So I think the player is doing the Right Thing now. It's certainly doing the best it can with the material it's been given.

---

Yeah, you're right, leaving the bit reservoir in place could cause some sonic issues with normal tracks. But I figured that if the track isn't gapless to begin with, that it would be even more inaudible with "gapped" tracks than with "gapless" ones. I could be wrong about that though.

It might be nice to have a configurable setting to preserve the bit reservoir or not. This setting could be made global, or it could be set for each playlist.

Still, Terminator says he's looking into the '--nogap' setting on LAME, which should be a real help.


Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266

In reply to:

---

"--nogap is the same as making one big mp3 file with the encoder and then splitting it youself on mp3 frame bounderies. --nogap has one extra nicety in that it will reset the bitreservoir at track bounderies, so the first frame of all the mp3 files will be valid when played back by itself.

---

Ah, this looks like just what I was hoping for. But I'm a bit concerned about this:

In reply to:

---

For nogap to work in a player with a play list of the 10 mp3 files, the player just needs to not reset the encoding engine between each mp3 file.

---

Does he mean to say the "decoding" engine? And why can't the engine be reset, if the bit reservoir is no longer an issue?

Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266

In reply to:

---

If they do, then it would suffice never to reset the decoder: files made by cutting a large MP3 would play exactly as one, and in the case of independend files the 'leftover' from the first would not spoil the beginning of the next.

---

This is actually the behavior I'm hoping for... but the last part about independent filies is not 100% certain. Frankly I haven't heard evidence that the leftover bit reservoir information would be audible during the gap silence. But someone else may have heard it. And just because I'm more sensitive to glitches in gapless playback doesn't mean I should irritate someone's sensitivity to noise in a gap :-)

I think the absolute best solution would be to have a flag in each playlist that, when enabled, prevents the decoder from returning to neutral between consecutive tracks.You could use a similar playlist flag to tell the decoder to fade in and/or out gapless tracks when they are played independently (e.g. during shuffleplay).

I hope that this discussion is not suggesting that I'm unappreciative of the efforts to get gapless playback working. Frankly I'm thrilled about what's gone into 2.0, including what already has been done on gapless playback. In fact, I am now encouraged to keep my empeg; the announcement of its impending demise really had be thinking about selling it.

But I do think that the beta period is a perfect time to be making this noise, so I'm doing so!

Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266

Here's another phenomenon I've encountered on one of my CDs that I'm trying to understand how best to duplicate on an EMPEG.

If you've created CUE sheets with Exact Audio Copy (for example), then you've seen that most CD tracks have an "Index 0" timestamp and an "Index 1" timestamp. Usually, the time period between Index 0 and Index 1 contains the inter-track silence, and the music proper begins at Index 1. If you use the "skip forward" or "skip backward" buttons on a CD player, it will always seek out the Index 1 timestamp.

However, there is nothing that prevents the CD from having sound between Index 0 and Index 1. Indeed, one of my CDs does just that. In this case, what happens is that the band starts playing, and then decides to stop playing and start over again. The "false" start lies between Index 0 and Index 1, and the second "true" start actual track begins at Index 1. There's no gap in between. If you try to hit your CD player's "skip backward" button to go back to the beginning of the track, you won't hear the false start; it will just move back to Index 1 and continue from there.

Now when I'm encoding this track, I have two choices:

1) Keep this false start as part of the MP3 file.
2) Split the track into two pieces between the false start and the true start, and encode the two pieces in some sort of gapless fashion.

The first method is the easiest. The second has the potential to better emulate the behavior of the CD when I'm playing it back. However, the one quirk of the second method is that I wouldn't want the "false start" to play if I was in "shuffle play" mode. So, I would need to find a way to ignore that track if I'm shuffling, but I'd want it to play if I'm going sequentally through the album.

What do you think, folks?


Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266

Greetings!

Having actually put these "hidden audio" bits in some of my past projects, you have to be careful when ripping. Many rippers will add this onto the end of the previous track. Not a problem if the audio is before track 1, but it can be annoying if it is elsewhere in the album.

I personally prefer to rip it as its own track, and only have it in linear playlists. I omit it from anything I do that is randomized. It is the only way I know of to give the audio clip its own identity, independent of the tracks before and after it.

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (96GB Smoke)
SN# 030103046 (10GB Blue - Emergency Spare)

What do you think, folks?

Start a new thread on this subject! I hate it when the subject is changed somewhere in the thread...

­­______________
Edwin de Vaan

In reply to:

---

Start a new thread on this subject! I hate it when the subject is changed somewhere in the thread...

---

Fair enough. I think it was reasonable to put the gapless stuff here, but this particular subject change is a bit too far off-topic. I may just do that later today...

Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266

I think it was reasonable to put the gapless stuff here

Of course! It is always useful to put up your thoughts on this BBS. I sincerely hope a more gapless playback is possible with version 2.0. Let's wait and see!

­­______________
Edwin de Vaan

In reply to:

---

Beta 1 will be released to the alpha test team tonight, and if they don't break it horribly it will go public on Monday. If they do break it horribly, we might release their home addresses to the BBS *grin*

---

Ok I think its about time. Whats their home address? or just thier IP addresses will do!!


-Doug
Mk2-12G Blue (Now A/R Green)

Hope Rob isn't regretting putting a time on a release!

Honest Rob, all is forgiven!!

as long as v2 is released soon!

Murray
Go-Wit-Da-Fro

Monday is quickly fading here on the west coast! 30 minutes left.


|| loren.cox ||

20 minutes and counting...
-mark

This space used in memory of the victims from 09/11/01

Maybe he meant for the Alpha testers to release it for him... and that's why he was going to hand out their addresses if it hadn't appeared by Monday...

*grin*

Kim

Ah, but there is a guy in an outrigger canoe somewhere in the middle of the Pacific with a large satellite dish and and laptop who still has 4 hours of Monday left...

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

Help me I'm HUNGRY .......................

Argh !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Empeg II - 10 Gb - Red Fascia - 750 Songs -

- I Will Strike From the Grey -

looks like this thread's replies is gonna beat the EOL one :)
not sure about # views tho..

That will happen in 2.x but not the first release. The plan is to go back to semi-regular releases with functionality updates in each.

Rob

WOW! You're back! Can you enlighten us with more details on the release time/date of v2.0?

­­______________
Edwin de Vaan

Anyone want to hazard a guess?

Has to be the improved gapless playback. Right?

tanstaafl.

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

Right. You know me too well.

___________
Tony Fabris