Soooo... Does anyone know how far off are we are from seeing a beta for v3 yet? Or maybe even another Alpha build?


Joey DiJulio

"when it's ready" will be the standard line you'll get from everyone.

These days it's more a case of "when it's not broken by everything else we're doing". I load state of the build releases from time to time and they're generally getting better, but almost always with some annoying breakage in a specific area.

When our new projects calm down a bit (e.g. go RC) we should get a chance to clean up the problems and release something. I'm not sure what new features might suddenly appear (fewer than those inherited from Karma I would think) but there should be something.

Rob

Hmmm - if you do pop in full support for extra RAM it might give me an excuse to install the chips Paul Grzelak sent through (thanks Paul!) because they are scarily small, and I can't say I need them - it would just be cool:-)

To be fair I don't use 3 alpha yet, as I change music on my empeg a lot - various uploads and tweaks, adding lyrics for emphatic etc - and I don't fancy the extra hassle of the downgrading for database rebuilds. So I'm really looking forward to a beta which sorts this.

Go Rob!

for your info rob I'll be joining a ship in mid june

and I don't fancy the extra hassle of the downgrading for database rebuilds.

I'm using V3 alpha 7 with JEmplode now for some time, and can assure the rebuild issue is not required (or at least not after it is upgraded and rebuild for the first time).

V3 Alpha 7 for me has just been buggy... I acctually liked Alpha 5 better (I just can't remember if we had the database rebuild problem with that build however, so I'm not downgrading...). I liked the sound better, and it seemed more stable for me...

In Alpha 7 I've had my Rio:

-Lock up 100% of the time while on the ossicilliscope visual (i know I miss-spelled that) The player will automatically restart.

-Back button dosen't work 75% of the time when no song is playing (although i've found if I play a song, it magically starts working again)

-Crossfading is still buggy... 50% of the time the song that you fade into will stop 5 seconds into the song, wait about .75 - 1.0 seconds, and then continue playing... It's also generally choppy when you are scrolling through a playlist (without it being on pause, in otherwords, listening to a song for 2-3 seconds, and then switching to the next song, then looping through that process for N number of songs)

-The player has just plain locked up on me a few times, requring me to remove it and re-insert it into the car dock to fix the problem.


Also, is there any reason that anyone knows of for why crossfading support has been limited to 3 (or maybe it was 5) seconds?

The first build I played with that had crossfade support allowed me to do 10 second crossfades, which I liked much better (some songs have enough silence on the end that a 3 (or 5) second fade dosen't fade at all (considering your fading out silence))


All and all, I'm looking forware to the new builds!


Joey

The reason why alpha 5 sounded different is that there was a bug with stereo separation which was enabled for everything. You should be able to duplicate the sound of alpha 5 by turning on stereo separation for everything.

Crossfade in alpha 3 had a bug where the dialog let you go up to 5. It only ever did a max of 3 seconds even if you told it 5. The dialog bug was fixed after alpha 3.

I've played with the stereo seperation (I've been told that before) and it still seems to sound a bit differant - I don't know, maybe I'm nuts...

And as for the crossfade it must have been the placebo effect that made me think it was a 5 second fade... But I could have sworn it was...

Either way - Is there any reason we can't have it fade 5, 10, or even 20 seconds for that matter? Is it a caching/memory issue? Or just someone dosen't want to allow it to be more than 3

It just seems kind of pointless to me to have it "crossfade" if it only does for 3 seconds... I really want to hear the tracks mesh together

It's a definite memory issue. The player has to read ahead and decode the audio first, then mesh it and store the result in memory (or something like that. That sounds a bit like how it was explained).

Maybe the 32Mb-RAM-boosted-Empeg users could have the ability to set crossfade to 20 or 30 seconds

Maybe the 32Mb-RAM-boosted-Empeg users could have the ability to set crossfade to 20 or 30 seconds

You might be right on the stereo separation part. I only had alpha 5 running for a very short period of time so I never really listened closely. Maybe I should downgrade to 64kbps MP3s...