Help. I messed up SWMBO's Karma and don't know how to fix it.

I wanted to delete some files that she didn't want on her Karma (WHat? She doesn't like Car Talk?) and connected what I thought was a standard USB cable with mini-plug, and everything seemed OK and I deleted the files.

The operation crashed, I had a hard time getting things going again (had to do the paper clip reset thing) and after that I had nothing but trouble...until I dug up the original Karma USB cable, then like magic everything worked normally. Is the Karma USB cable proprietary? It is shaped like a standard USB mini-cable. Or is the non-Karma cable I used (it was for a flash card reader) the non-standard one? Or maybe they both are standard and the flash card cable was defective? Anyway, as I said, everything started working...

Except... The Karma says the files I deleted are still there, but if I try and delete them it says "File not found..." and I have to abort out of the operation.

How do I fix this?

tanstaafl.

The Karma cable is just a regular USB cable. I'd assume that your flash card reader would also be similar.

Its been a while since I've used my Karma but isn't there some scan option in the menu somewhere?

It's possible that the Karma was just having technical problems unrelated to the cable, and changing out the cable was just a coincidence. It's also possible that it really was a bad cable, or maybe it was a cable not rated for high speed data transfer?

In any case, I think the option to rebuild or rescan the thing is buried somewhere in its troubleshooting menus.

Yes, Tools-->Options-->Advanced-->Troubleshooting-->Re-scan your music. That's the only thing I can find that looks even remotely promising, but all that does is re-scan the music on the PC the next time RMM starts up. Does nothing for the database on the Karma itself. RMM says the files are still there, the Karma screen says the files are still there, but if I try and play one of them the Karma reboots itself, and if I try to delete one of them RMM locks up and I have to pull the Karma off the dock and reset it.

About the only option I haven't tried is "Reformat", and I suspect the consequences of that one will be ugly, although I guess it wouldn't kill me to reload the Karma from scratch.

tanstaafl.

edit: Hunh! I got them to delete. The trick was to highlight the file and hit the delete key and get the "File not found..." error dialog. Then, before it locked up RMM trying to delete the file, I clicked the Cancel button. After that, immediately I deleted the file again and the second time it actually deleted.

Don't ask me why...

Question: The Karma has been sitting in its dock, connected to the PC, with the "Finished" screen showing for about an hour, and it is quite warm, to the point where the back of it is slightly uncomfortable to touch, probably 115--120 degrees F. Is this normal?

tanstaafl.

I meant some sort of rebuild database option buried in a menu on the Karma. I could have sworn that I saw something like that in there in its menus.

The rebuild option on the Karma is in Menu -> Settings -> Troubleshooting -> Rescan Music. This can take a while, depending on how full it is. I could've sworn there was a "Restore factory defaults" option, but can't find it now.

I'm not sure what to tell you about the heat when docked. I do remember mine getting hot like that from time to time but tended not to keep it docked for very long after the battery was fully charged.

I would just be on the lookout for any ominous bulging.

Good luck.

ps. Keep an eye out for the 32 GB flash version of the vibez due out in the next month or so. Just in case.

pps. Now that I pulled my Karma out for the first time in months, I had to plug in my SR-60s and give it a listen. I love my vibez, but damn the Karma sounds good.

Hah! Proves what an idiot I am. I thought I had to do that with my computer and was looking all over Rio Music Manager to do the job. Never occurred to me to look in the software in the Karma itself!

Well, now that I have your attention... there's another problem, not as severe but vexing nonetheless.

I have three bookmarks set up, and one of them gives trouble. I can update that bookmark, play some music, and then go back to bookmarks and select that bookmark, and it will take me right where it's supposed to go. However, if I select a different bookmark and play some music, then try and select the original bookmark, the Karma crashes and reboots. Every time.

The bookmark in question contains 12 hour-long tracks, and I'm wondering if that has anything to do with it?

tanstaafl.

edit: Doing the re-scan didn't solve the problem. I wonder if the problem might be the "intermediate" bookmark -- it is 542 tracks, probably 40+ hours of music. It does act like an out-of-memory situation.

db

Sounds like a corrupted bookmark. If the Karma's bookmarks work anything like the bookmarks on the Empeg, I'd suspect hard disk drive trouble here.

Can you save it as a new bookmark and delete the corrupted one?

I deleted the old bookmark, created a new one. The new one works (that is, doesn't work) just like the old one. Perhaps one of the music files is corrupted. I'll delete and reload them and see if that helps.

edit No, that didn't help, but maybe I found out what the problem is. The "intermediate" bookmark, that is, the one I go to between attempts to play other bookmarks, is too large -- 542 tracks, 40-50 hours. Any time I try and call up a bookmark from within that bookmark, the Karma crashes. In other words, when it crashes it isn't the bookmark I'm attempting to load, but the one I am coming from that seems to be the problem.

tanstaafl.

Shouldn't be a size limit issue. I just created a bookmark with 1655 tracks in it along with a couple of smaller ones. My Karma had no trouble at all switching back and forth between them.

I'm guessing you're probably right about the corrupted track. Do you have anything listed on the Bad Tracks screen? Menu -> Settings -> Troubleshooting -> Bad Tracks. If so, delete them all from that screen, then try again.

No bad tracks.

tanstaafl.

I'm stumped. I've got some other ideas, but they're pretty random and might not fix the problem:

- Reflash the firmware (should be ver 1.68)
- Start deleting bunches of tracks and see if the problem goes away (probably very inefficient)
- Format (crappy thing here is you lose all playcount info for the DJ)

If you go with the delete or reformat option, make sure you've got the latest version of RMM running before you re-sync. IIRC, you want ver 2.96.

Good luck.

Do you have images or comments in the tags? I've seen this cause issues with my Karma but not exactly the issue your having.

Images, no. Comments, yes.

Since the playlist that crashes has only 9 items in it, it won't be hard to start deleting them one at a time and see if one of them being gone makes it start working. Or maybe a binary test -- delete half and test each half, if one half fails, delete half of that, etc. No doubt if I gave a great deal of thought to the most efficient way to do it, I would only spend about twice as much time figuring the best way as it would actually take me to do it the worst way.

tanstaafl.

Just curious, how'd you make out?

Badly.

I am starting to think there is a bad track, not in the playlist that crashes, but in the large playlist that is active before the next bookmark crashes it. No matter what bookmark I choose, if it comes after the large playlist, it crashes. So I'll start the binary thing -- narrow it down half at a time until I find the culprit. I even went so far as to delete all the songs in the Karma and reload them, didn't fix the problem. Haven't reformatted it yet, and since I don't have an ethernet connection that will talk to it (can't get ethernet to talk to my empeg either, now) I don't think I can reflash the firmware.

tanstaafl.

The large playlist had three bad tracks in it. If I started that playlist by selecting it with a bookmark, whatever bookmark I chose next would crash the system. Once those tracks were removed, everything worked properly.

Fortunately it was easy to find the bad tracks, as they were *.wav files without tags (obviously) so they always sorted to the top of the playlist if I sorted on anything other than title (no artist, no genre, no album, etc.). The files were apparently the artifact of a bad rip, they were all three from the same CD, and would not play in Winamp. But wait... I just tested, and my computer won't play any *.wav file. What would cause that? Also, I noticed today that I can't play my empeg (nor my Karma) through the computer's sound card (line out --> microphone in) and I suspect that the two problems are related. It might be some sort of configuration problem with Total Recorder. ??

Anyway, getting rid of those three *.wav files solved the problem in the Karma.

tanstaafl.

Not being able to hear line-in audio through the sound card's mixer, and a computer that refuses to play .WAV files; those should theoretically be two completely different and unrelated issues.

Hm. Unless, as you say, it's a configuration issue with Total Recorder. I could imagine that might do it.

Anyway, line out -> microphone in shouldn't work at all anyway. You need line out -> line in. If the computer doesn't *have* a line in, then you might be out of luck.

Also look here.

Since when does Karma play WAV files???

I kinda think that was the root cause of the problem. Rio Music Manager will happily load all the *.wav tracks into the Karma you want. But since the Karma is driven by MP3 tags, and the *.wav files obviously have no tags, there is no way for the Karma to actually find and [/b]play[/b] them!

The only thing I have found that *.wav files do in the Karma is make it crash.

tanstaafl.

I have both Microphone (pink) and Line-In (blue) inputs. Neither does anything when an audio source is connected to it. Normally when hot-plugging a jack into one of these inputs I would expect to hear a pop from the speakers. In my case, nothing. I do get a speaker pop when I plug/unplug the jack from the Line-Out (green) jack.

I followed the instructions about Vista and sound cards, but it was set up correctly already, that is, not muted.

I can play MP3 files from my computer with no difficulty. When I select a *.wav file to play, Windows Media Player comes up, and the progress bar creeps across the bottom of the screen in total silence.

If I put an audio CD in the CD player, nothing happens, probably because I have autoplay turned off. If I go to Windows Explorer and click on the H: Drive letter (which is annotated "DVD RW Drive (H:) Audio CD") I get an error message that says: "This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel." WTF does that mean? DBPowerAmp has no difficulty accessing, reading, and ripping CDs in that drive. NERO sees the drive and CD, but plays the files the same way Windows Media Player plays *.wav files -- in complete silence.

EDIT All of a sudden, out of the blue, I can now play *.wav files from my computer. I opened Total Recorder, didn't change anything, closed it, tried to play one of the *.wav files that wreaked such havoc in SWMBO's Karma with the same results as before, tried a different *.wav file (one that I knew was good and had tried unsuccessfully to play earlier this evening) and it played.

Incidentally, those three *.wav files that made the Karma so unhappy really are defective. I transcoded them to *.mp3 using the Switch transcoder (neat little program, that) and Windows Media Player choked on them (the MP3s) as well as on the original *.wav files.

But I STILL can't play audio through my Line-In port on the computer.

tanstaafl.

Didn't it always play WAV files?

Not true. The Karma doesn't need tags to play a file. As far as I know, it works just like the empeg: if there aren't any tags on the file, the "title" tag in the Karma gets filled with the file name. I think the problem was that the files themselves were somehow corrupted.

Regarding your problem with Media player: Clearly something's up with Total Recorder.

Regarding your problem with Line-In: Might still me something up with Total Recorder, although I never had that problem myself.

Yes... but to play a file on the Karma, you have to choose artist, or album, or genre, etc. Oh, wait -- "Track" refers to filename, so you can find it that way. I'm sure you're right, RMM wouldn't let you load *.wav files if the Karma couldn't play them.

I may try uninstalling Total Recorder (I have the download of the original program, and the registration code) and see if that changes anything. Total Recorder is a logical suspect, that whole virtual sound card thing it does has potential for breaking things.

tanstaafl.

Yes... but to play a file on the Karma, you have to choose artist, or album, or genre, etc. Oh, wait -- "Track" refers to filename, so you can find it that way. I'm sure you're right, RMM wouldn't let you load *.wav files if the Karma couldn't play them.

I may try uninstalling Total Recorder (I have the download of the original program, and the registration code so I can reinstall it) and see if that changes anything. Total Recorder is a logical suspect, that whole virtual sound card thing it does has potential for breaking things.

tanstaafl.