Hello everyone, I've been the proud owner of a RioCar now for going on 5 years but for the last 3 I have been a student and had to give up my car and, with it, my RioCar.
Now I have graduated and got a job, I'm back into vehicular transport and and going about refitting the wonderful RioCar.

Last time I used it, I think v2 final had just been released and I was having fun playing with all the new settings. A lot has changed since then, there seem to be v3 alphas in the long running but riocar.org seems to have stagnated.

I have tried going through these forums to figure out what is going on, but my kruft filter seems to be a little out of whack and I can't make heads or tails of anything. Would it be possible for someone to give me aquick run-down of the state of play for the RioCar at the moment?? Such as, how stable are these v3alpha builds, can I use my Ogg Vorbis files since I moved away from mp3 not so long ago?? Anything interesting at all would be greatly appriciated.

Looking forward to once again mbeing an active member of the community...

GT

Your OGG files will work, only on the V3 alphas, but the V3 alphas are unstable.

2.0 final is the best stable release. There is also Hijack, a very nifty kernel replacement that adds a bunch of great features, and Emphatic, an application that lets you customize the display, as well as letting you scroll song lyrics (only with a proper SYLT tag on an MP3 file).

Thanks a bunch. I remember playing with Hijack quite a while ago so I'll probably just lfash the entire drive and start afresh with v2 and hijack and go from there.

It's a shame to have to transcode my oggs, but at least it gives me a decent argument to buy a new hdd, rip everything from CD to FLAC, and transcode as and when I need to for my RioCar and iRiver.

One last question, is the v3 build still being activly developed. I know all of it must be in the spare time of those lucky few so is there any way to help out or contribute?? My coding skills are unfortunatly rather poor.

Thanks for your time.

I don't think anyone is actively working on the V3 alphas right now. I guess there's always a possibility for the futre, I suppose.

Also note that the latest V3 alpha is stable enough to run if you don't mind a few reboots and freezes now and again. I and several others here still run it all the time. It's definitely worth a look....the worst that can happen is that you have to flash back to 2.0.

Yup - I use v3alpha on both of mine and the very few reboots I get are all from when I try and do too many things at once (adding new tracks to playlist then fast forwarding or changing visuals while cacheing is underway etc) so I can easily avoid them.

The only downside is v3 needs extra RAM to smoothly run emphatic and as I have not got around to getting that last wire soldered from the ARM to the RAS select, I can't use emphatic at the moment... soon (in Cambridge if anyone fancies taking a few minutes out to help...there will be beers or whisky as payment:-)