I think it would be real cool if my Rio car would play a short audio file during its bootup sequence when the logo is displayed. I've searched through the forum archives and found that several people have done this a couple of years ago by adding some commands to their init file. Could anyone help me with some step by step instructions on how I could do this also? I am running version 2.0b11 and the latest hijack kernel.

I've never understood the desire to have a device make a boot-up sound. This is among the very first things I disable in any new Windows installation because I find it so irritating.

Remember that in your car, when you boot the player, it doesn't know what volume you want the player set to until after the player software has started. So any bootup sound will play at maximum volume, and you'd have to take that into account when creating the bootup sound.

If you really want to do this, I'm sure there are examples in the Developer Info section of the Riocar.org site of sound-player applets. Create your own init, and fire the applet in the init, and that will work. But I'm sure that after all the trouble, the novelty will wear off fast and you'll disable it within a few weeks.

Either that or you'll blow a speaker sometime when you plug in the player into your home system because you didn't know you had the volume turned up. Or the bootup sound will scare your date when you take her to the movies. Or some other thing will make you mad at the bootup sound and make you disable it...

This won't be possible. The reason for the animation display on the player, is to keep the user (you) happy while it sits there waiting for the drives to spin up. So it is generally unable to read an audio file from the drives whilst playing the animation.

Cheers

Right, but you could still play a startup sound right before the player software is invoked. My point is why would someone want to?

Well, actually, I should have said "won't be easy", rather than "won't be possible". I think we've already proved that pretty much anything is "possible" with the Empeg player..

Cheers

The player operates more like a PC and less like a Mac. A Mac has sound playing ability in its Bios and is able to play sounds on power on. A PC has the single ability to beep on startup and as the player doesn't even have in internal speaker, you have to wait until the unit finishes booting before sounds are played.
I personally think it is far more impressive to have the song resume playing where it was with the volume ramping up.

Well I'm a weird kind of guy that changes my windows sound themes often. I just think it would be a fun thing to do. I would probably load HAL 9000 or KITT into it. I'm sure it would freak out all my passengers. I'm sure that if I keep the same startup sound on I'd get bored of it fast, so I'd probably change it often. Ideally, it would be nice if it would randomly choose 1 of several startup sounds. Or you could load a speech synthesis engine onto it and it could say some random phrase or something boring like the date and time.

But for now I want to see if I can get it to just play 1 simple audio file. I'm not very experienced in linux so could someone tell me exactly what I need to do. I downloaded my init file off the unit, but I see it is a binary file, not plain text. I was expecting it to be like autoexec.bat was in the old dos days. How do I edit the init file to load an applet, and what audio applet would you reccomend?

Look for the old threads about the Picker application. There's a bash script replacement for init included in the picker package. If you can't find it, holler and I'm sure I or someone else will post something...

/Michael

I've searched through the archives and have found many references to it, and a few URLs linking to it but the links are dead. Can anyone help me find this and help me set it up?

OK, I'm attaching the picker package...

and here's what I currently use as /bin/init to start some stuff:
(considering making the VNC server only start at AC power, but haven't really noticed a need yet...)
=BEGIN=======================================
#!/bin/sh
PATH=.:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/empeg/bin
PS1=empeg:\\w\\$
/bin/mount -n -o nocheck,rw /proc
/bin/mount -n -o nocheck,ro /dev/hda4 /drive0
/bin/mount -n -o nocheck,ro /dev/hdc4 /drive1
#start some stuff
/drive1/var/bin/VNC_server > /dev/null 2>&1
/drive1/var/bin/viewer > /dev/null 2>&1

while [ 1 ] ; do
/drive1/var/bin/pick_list
echo "Press q now to terminate to a shell prompt."
echo
/drive1/var/bin/getkey q && /bin/bash
echo Running Player...
/empeg/bin/player
/bin/bash
done
=END=========================================



To use it, create a suitably modified text file, save it with unix style line feeds (if you don't have an editor capable of that, I'd recommend getting UltraEdit)
Connect to the player, rename the original /bin/init (for instance to /bin/init.org), upload the text file and make it executable...

/Michael

Thank you very much. I'll try getting this to work tommorow and I'll post here when I'm successful

I've also written empeg-preinit to do stuff at startup. You can use it to do totally arbitrary things at startup by just writing shell scripts and adding them to a directory.

Yup, I know. I played with it a little but IIRC /proc isn't mounted at the time of preinit execution (should be obvious, now that I think of it, as /proc is mounted in init :-) which was what I wanted to read at that time. As I have other use for the picker, I have to modify init anyway...

/Michael

Ok, i've successfully installed picker and a custom init file. I've also learned a little bit of bash scripting so that I could program it to randomly play 1 of several startup sounds. However, I just need 1 more thing. Where can i find an audio player compiled for this processor that I can invoke from the script to actually play the sound?

Only thing I know of is a .mod player - has been posted to the board (quite a while ago)...

/Michael

True, but the audio device should be there at the time, which is all that would be needed to play a sound then.

Otherwise, you could write something that the shell script could spawn off and wait for something to be mounted. Hmmm. Actually, it might not be a bad idea for my preinit to do stuff right then and then have another part that waited around for the machine to be more fully ``up''.

I've downloaded and installed the mod player from http://www-new.incase.de/files/empeg/mod_player.tar.gz When I try to play a file with it pauses for the amount of time it takes to play the file, but I get no audio. I've tried it on various different files ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes, but there is just no sound.

I've found this entry in the readme file:

- No sound can be heard
-> Run the default player once (make sure you actually hear something),
stop it, then use the module player. (the DSP seems to need
initialization after a certain idle time

It seems this program would be useless to me if the DSP isn't initialized during start up. But I did try running the player software and then quitting back into the shell. The empeg player works fine, but I still get no audio from the mod player. Do you have any suggestions or does anyone else know of a different player I could use?

Sorry, no ideas - never played with the mod player myself...

/Michael