There's awealth of tech gurus here so my question is, if your uploading a file (MP3) to empeg and playing it at the same time (ala Winamp) should it affect the file being uploaded to the empeg?
It doesn't seem to but sometimes I can't tell the difference between a Lame or Blade encoded file back to back. I can however tell the difference sometimes in a bad rip.

I can't imagine why playing the MP3 file on PC should influence its concurrent uploading to empeg. Uploading is not time critical (within reason), and both programs need only read access to the file, so there should be no sharing conflicts, either.

I've done precisely that (played the same file I'm uploading) many times without ill effects. Go for it.

It comes down to how a given application chooses to lock the file as it opens it. I forget the actual names of the flags in the Windows API, but there are a lot of choices you can make when opening a file programatically.

An app can choose to lock the file so that only it can read it. For instance, if the app intends to modify the file, it could say "everyone else: hands off".

Or, an app could lock the file so that anyone else can read it, but not write to it. It's like saying "okay, you guys can look at this file, but if you want to change it, forget it because I'm trying to look at it at the same time". I'm pretty sure WinAmp uses this flag when it's playing the file. Since Emplode seems to use the same "everyone can read" flag, then it's OK for Winamp and Emplode to see the file at the same time.

Interestingly, WinAmp will release its locks when the file is stopped. For instance, I can open a file in WinAmp, play it, and press the Stop button. Then I can open the same file in MP3Trim, make changes, save the changes, and then press Play in WinAmp and hear the changes. Very nice.

Hey thanks guys, this was somewhat of a curiousity & somewhat I hope I'm not going to have to re-upload the files. Because they were slightly damaged & when I listen to them can't figure out what that slight weird noise is.

I take it that your problem is: files that sound fine on WinAmp but sound strange played on the empeg with 2.0b3?

If that's the case, the first thing to do is to downgrade to 1.03 and see if the problem goes away. Then you know it's not the file's fault.

There is a known bug where some files might play back wrong in 2.0b3 (too loud, clipping). If, after the next beta release, the files still play back incorrectly, then make sure the empeg team gets a copy of the file to check against their new decoder engine.

Actually no I haven't heard any files damaged but if I heard weirdness in a file that I could rule that out. Since I wasn't sure how simultaneous uploading/listening would affect the uploaded file.

There is a known bug where some files might play back wrong in 2.0b3
Yes, I was aware of that bug & actually had a file do that now it's fine.