I tend to add music to my empeg only once every month or two. I'd saved up a bunch of new toonage, bumping me up from 40 to over 50GB (10427 tunes altogether). Since I'm always tweaking and cleaning up tags with iTunes, I deleted everything and started over, loading up the empeg with jemplode (prerelease 45, I believe). When I went to delete some accidental directories that had no files in them, the empeg rebooted in the middle of the sync. Okay, fine. I got out my WinXP laptop and was able to do the cleanup with the real emplode.

So far, so good.

I put it back in the car. I'm now experiencing three consistent, reproducible problems.

1) My empeg no longer remembers its playlist. Every time it starts up, it shows me an empty playlist. It takes a solid minute to regenerate the playlist, so this is kinda annoying. After that, it will work normally until I turn off the car. Turn it back on and the playlist is gone again.

2) Roughly 18 seconds into playing the first song, there is always a pop and the music is subsequently quieter. This happens no matter the song. It's always the first song after the playlist is constructed. Subsequent songs might have pops as well, but not at a predictable location.

3) If you hit the left button to restart the track, it just sits there at 0:00 time, not advancing, but not paused. The pause button will display the pause icon, and pressing it again makes the icon go away, but no music. Hitting foward and then back makes the music start playing again like I wanted.

I'm running my trusty original MkII with the 2.0 release software, developer build, plus the Hijack kernel (not sure of the version, maybe it's version 340, but it was right after 2.0 final came out). The only Hijack features I'm using so far are volume adjust and the left/right time delay.

Again, all of these bugs are consistent and repeatable. Any ideas what the problem(s) might be? Could it be the lack of RAM in the MkII? Should I switch it out for my MkIIa? Could it be a problem with the database, perhaps a side-effect of using jemplode rather than emplode? I figured I'd check here before I start poking around every possible loose end.

Any ideas what the problem(s) might be?

Yes. This:

I'd saved up a bunch of new toonage, bumping me up from 40 to over 50GB (10427 tunes altogether).

The FAQ entry is here, specifically the third paragraph.

If I recall correctly, you might be able to fix it by cleaning up the tags. This is fuzzy in my brain at the moment, so someone correct me if I'm wrong, but...

1) The database size is determined by how much data is in the tags. So for instance, if all of the tags have their comment field filled out, the database is bigger than if the comment was blank in all the tags.

2) Dapper Dan says he uses iTunes to organize his collection. Doesn't iTunes put the useless text "Encoded with iTunes x.xx" in every comment field?

Perhaps it's as simple as removing the comment tag from all the tunes and reloading them. You might even be able to do that directly within emplode or Jemplode, but I have no idea how slow those programs will be if you try to group-select and change 10,000 comment tags. It might even crash the program to try.

You might even be able to do that directly within emplode or Jemplode, but I have no idea how slow those programs will be if you try to group-select and change 10,000 comment tags. It might even crash the program to try.

Even then, you do not modify the original mp3 files (at least, not with emplode). So it would help your database file size, but that is about it. If you want to remove it from the tags, you might be best off using MP3 Tag Studio and re-uploading.

MP3TS is extremely stable for batch work also. For the record, I used it to fix my entire collection about a year ago when having missing VBR headers finally caused me enough grief to actually fix it. It only took one shot, and I just let it run.

Edit: Something else to look for. When dealing with large amounts of files on the empeg, be careful what playlists you are dealing with. If you use the down-down-down method of randomizing your player, this will also capture and shuffle any songs that are in sub-playlists on your player, easily pushing you over the edge. You may want to set "ignore as child" on some of your sub-playlists, and see if this helps.

Welcome to the club!

I have a lot of useful information in the comments. Lately, I've been typing in all the names of the musicians in every jazz combo. Removing all that information would deeply suck. Hacking jemplode to ignore the comment field seems like a better solution. I guess I'll have to look into that, if somebody else doesn't get it done first.

Still, this would only seem to solve one of my three problems (forgetting the playlist on startup). The other problems (incorrect handling of the "back" button, pops in the music) aren't described anywhere in the FAQ.

If it's all related to going over-size on my database, would switching to the MkIIa (with its additional RAM) in the car be the answer?

Greetings!

As for the back button and the pops...

Do you have any signs of disk or memory problems on your player? Are you running hijack, using the reservecache flag in config.ini or running third party software?

I suspect that the 18second glitch and sudden change in volume might be related to the amount of music in the buffer, and a sudden shift to having to access data again. Do you use the autovol settings of hijack at all?

I also suspect that the situation with your going back to the previous track may also be related to a memory issue (flushing the buffer) or a disk issue.

It might be a good idea to run a memory test on the unit, just to be safe. Also, you might want to run a manual fsck and not any errors that you might see.

Lastly, if you are running any third party software or reserving cache memory, try unloading / changing the settings to see if your symptoms change as well.

Do you have any signs of disk or memory problems on your player? Are you running hijack, using the reservecache flag in config.ini or running third party software?

Yes on Hijack, but nothing else beyond that. No reserves. No signs of hardware failures, at least that I've seen.

Do you use the autovol settings of hijack at all?

Yup, that's probably why the volume drops. The pop from the ram cache running dry could be freaking out the volume adjustment.

It might be a good idea to run a memory test on the unit, just to be safe. Also, you might want to run a manual fsck and not any errors that you might see.

Is there a preferred memory test program? I'll have to go in and play with fsck'ing the disks. My suspicion is that the hardware is all fine as everything does work once it's in steady state, modulo the popping. If there were bad memory or disk, then I'd expect to see much flakier and inconsistent behavior. Hmm... the first and most obvious test is to try some smaller playlists rather than just down-down-down to get everything. I'll try that today on the drive home.

More experimental results:

On my empeg, I dragged my iTunes folder over whole, then I have a couple soup playlists made with jemplode. If I directly select the iTunes folder, skipping the soup lists, the I end up with one fewer tune in the playlist, and the empeg successfully remembers its playlist across reboots. Fascinating.

Otherwise, I haven't been able to make a dent in the pop after 18-or-so seconds. Even if I select a much smaller playlist, the problem still occurs. The back-button issue likewise persists. If I press "back" when the song has only been going for a few seconds, it works fine. If I wait until I'm a minute into the song, after which presumably the beginning of the song is no longer in cache, then the back button makes the empeg stall. Hitting forward and back again is the current work-around.

Paul, do you experience similar problems with your massively loaded empeg? Are you using a MkII or a MkIIa?

Greetings!

Keep in mind that the one playlist you are not loading (if it is the soup) has everything on your player repeated, so that would certainly put you over the limit of what can be saved.

I do not have any problems with backing up causing unusual pauses or pops. I am running with a Mark2a, though. Perhaps a reflash of your kernel - just to verify the software end of things.