Tried to search but didn't find a good answer, other than others have had the problem.

Well, I've had my Empeg MkIIa for a few years now. Its been very good to me, generally, over the years, but I notice that some tracks have become corrupt with time. Nothing major, but it is a little disconcerting to hear a sudden <p0p> or <ScrEEch> while I am cruising down a country road. Sometimes tracks seem to have had several minuites of silence tacked onto the end!

I'm wondering why are the files getting corruped? I would think if it were the head of the disk crashing into the platter it would cause a much greater error (IE: HD failure), and AFAIK the tracks are read only when actually in the car so they shouldn't be "modified".

Another thought I have had, though it seems unlikely, is that it could be due to my IDE cable. I have had isolated "No Hard Disk Found" errors once in a great while. Could that be contributing to the cause?

Its not a huge deal, I dont mind reloading every once in a while, I would just like to have some idea of the cause!

Thanks.

Dviant,

I don't know that others here will necc. agree with me, but you need to do the following:

1) Buy a new drive cable from Stu (see the Eutronix link at the top of the page).

2) Put the new cable in your Empeg (attached to the proper places of course )

3) Enjoy problem free audio!

Seriously, I had this same problem and it went away the second I replaced the cable. I would recommend the extra-length cable.

Just my $0.02.

It's in the FAQ actually Probably a dud cable or a bad IDE header on the motherboard.

It could also be a bad chip. that happened on my Mk2, but it's really rare.

NO, it's MOST LIKELY to be the cable - the IDE "problem" is just not that frequent.

I have them here at carsupport@xs4all.nl

No one seems to have mentioned the big question here - do the tracks have the same problems and at the exact same spots each time you play them? (IE: Can you rewind and hear the same glitch?)

The drive cable is most likely, but it won't cause predictable repeatable errors. If, as you imply, your tracks were clean when uploaded and developed glitches while living on the hard drive, you've managed to do something very odd to them. It's also possible they always had the glitches, but your mp3 software on your computer dealt with the errors better.

Matthew

Quote:
Well, I've had my Empeg MkIIa for a few years now. Its been very good to me, generally, over the years, but I notice that some tracks have become corrupt with time.

I'm assuming that the songs have been on his player for several years and this is recent. You are correct in mentioning that some programs like Winamp do a better job of dealing with "bad" files than the empeg at times.

Investigating what tracks I can remember had errors. Should have made a list but its a little... disconcerting to be writing something while driving.

I'm honestly begining to think its the tracks, and not the player. For the most part at least. A couple errors I have actually traced to the source CD itself. A couple are tracks that have come from friends (who arent nearly as picky as me). Apparently WinAMP handles them alot better than the Empeg, but I can hear the errors if I'm listening for them. There are others tracks but I can't find them yet.

In a month or two I am planning to do a drive swap/upgrade. Just to be safe I'll get a new cable and have a look at my header when I open it up. I'm just going to reload everything so If I continue to have errors and everything else looks good it is definitely the tracks.

I appreciate the help, though.

You said you'd gotten "hard disk not found" errors intermittently. A properly functioning player will never, under any circumstances, show that error message. So I think a certain number of your glitches are very likely a disk drive or disk connection issue.

It's true that some of the glitches could be in the source files themselves, so it's good to check them out. And the silent bits at the end of some tracks could very well be the source files. But since you also got the hard disk not found error, I wouldn't count on all the glitches being the source files. You're not gonna get that lucky.

Just press and hold the number 7 button on the empeg/Rio remote which marks the track. You can then connect with emplode later on and find the tracks you marked.

I was receiving Hard Disk Not Found messages and hearing glitches in some of my tracks also. Before I replaced the cable, I replaced the jumper on the Slave drive and my problems vanished.

I'm not sure how frequently a 'bad jumper' would cause problems but it saved me the hassle of replacing the drives/cables.

(Of course this wouldn't be an issue in single-drive players)

-Steve

Perhaps you also re-seated the cables while playing with the jumper. A "bad" cable and "loose" cable act the same way - both are intermitent. Someone here even talked me into putting dielectric grease (the same stuff you use for car light bulbs) on the connectors and it seemed to cure my problems (after repeated playing with a new cable didn't help.)

Keep in mind that the laptop hard drives used have a slightly narrower pin pitch for the jumpers. If you are using a jumper that was made for desktop hard drives, it will be slightly loose and might lose contact.