well when i first got my empeg it ws seemless when changing songs.. now it takes like 2 - 3 seconds to load them. this kinda seemed like it started after i added my second drive.... im not sure if thats effecting it or not.. but before i used to change songs in the play list.. and bam quickness.. now i wait.. it gets kinda of annoying..

Even with two drives, there should be no pauses between songs at all. The song switches should be totally seamless (in 2.0) and almost totally seamless (in 1.0x), within the constraints of the MP3 files themselves.

You could be looking at drive/cable trouble as described here, but just for the heck of it, it wouldn't happen to be this problem?

hrm.. checked cables ect. config.ini looks sharp.. im goign to try reloading b11, i may have screwed something up while messing with stuff.

I bet you'll see an error at boot up on hyperterminal.

I have the SAME problem on my 60 gig player. I have a 12 gig player that has no pauses between tracks at all. My 60 gig player sometimes changes tracks instantly and sometimes takes 2-3 seconds to go to the next track. I also noticed that when I fast forward to the next song, sometimes it is seamless and sometimes it hangs for a second or two...
I just chalked it up to 60 gigs instead of 12 gigs = more time to wait. Who knows, maybe the 12 gig drive I have in my EMPEG is better then the two 30 gig drives that are in my Rio. I guess that means EMPEG really is better then RIO!!!

yup just reinstalled b11.. still same problem.. but dosent seem as bad as before.. im going to check boot up for errors.. then ill post..

heres a list of all the errors i get.. some seem like ive had them since the first time i ever booted.. some i havent noticed before

1. Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19

2. ! mp3_decoder.cpp :1049:Failed to find valid sync after seeking to offset 1413
414, error=0xc0044000

3. ircomm_tty: virtual tty driver for IrCOMM ( revision:Wed May 26 00:49:11 1999 )
531, error=0xc0044000

4. NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.try: 'Home/Work
Trying to unmount
empeg-car player (hardware revision 9, serial number 30102171)2/cmd.exe) failed

do any of these 4 error's or fails seem like a problem?

it seems like the drives spun donw.. and its the time it takes for it to spin back up

I noticed slower track to track times with b7 compared to b3. B11 seems to be better (for reasons of engineering or complete coincidence), but not as seamless (quick) as b3.

Tony, would you mind checking the internal bug list to see if any of the brightness oddities have made it in there? My player has been mysteriously flicking its brightness for a second (or split second) every now and then (this morning went to my dimmer lights-on setting while I was driving with lights off - the other day it did the opposite (bright when should have been dimmed)).

Bruno

My turn signal can make the dimmer turn on sometimes. Maybe hugo could make the delay longer before the dimmer activates.

Sean

Interesting. I signal every single turn I make. I'll look into this. Don't know why the turn signal would be causing a 12v spike on the illumination line, but stranger things have happened (like the stinkin back voltage from my relay going up through the remote line and getting through my Clarion HU and then into its antenna line).

Bruno

hrm.. ill try going back to b3 see if that fixes it.. it the player like halts for 2 - 5 seconds when you let a song play for about 1:00 then change a track or playlist.. but if you just start going thru and it seems like the drives spun up its seemless..

Hm, I sometimes (rarely) see something like that on my 60GB unit under 2.0b11. There are no error messages on serial (I am pretty sure I looked quickly enough), but 'W' usually appears by the drive icon. It looks as if one of the drives sometimes fails to spin up as quickly as it should.

When it arrived, the unit exibited classical faulty drive cable problems (blocking in the middle of boot etc), but they have gone away, so I didn't find courage yet to open it and install the replacement cable David sent me.

My 60gig Mk2a also sometimes "waits" 2-3 secs before starting to play the track. This only happens when I've skipped a (or more) track(s). I figured this was still a bug in b11, since this didn't happen in 1.03.
I guess it will be resolved in a future upgrade. Apart from some small problems (like this one), I've been very happy with b11 so far.

My 60gig Mk2a also sometimes "waits" 2-3 secs before starting to play the track. This only happens when I've skipped a (or more) track(s).

If you skip ahead enough tracks while the disk is spun down, the player has no option but to spin the disk up again (taking maybe four or five seconds) before playback starts. "Enough" is about three or four.

If anyone is encountering 2-3 second delays between tracks during normal play -- without you having skipped ahead -- that's unquestionably a bug.

Peter

Ok, I'm sorry I noticed this thread just now. I have the same identical problem, and I believe it IS due to the fact that drives are spun down. I can hear them spinning up every time I get a delay in the conditions mentioned by others (pushing the forward button, pausing and un-pausing, or whatever).
And yes, that happens also when pushing the forward button only once. This has never happened before I installed b11, so have been assuming so far that it is a brand new bug. However, this does NOT occur always. I would say 30% of the times...

I can back up what Taym says : this also happens when I press "next" only once.
It's not that bad of a bug, only somewhat annoying. Especially since I've worked long enough with 1.03 to notice the difference.

If anyone is encountering 2-3 second delays between tracks during normal play -- without you having skipped ahead -- that's unquestionably a bug.

Or a hardware issue. I haven't seen this happen on my two-drive player.

Admittedly, it's not a 60gb full up with tunes, so I guess that bugs with extremely large databases are potentially possible and wouldn't show on my player.

I get this with an 18+30Gb player so it's not just the huge drives. The 30Gb has only just been added so the player only has 3500 tunes - about 20Gb on it.

The same thing happens to me under two conditions-

With the new Beta 11, and ONLY when changing from one playlist to another. It does not happen between songs in one playlist.

I hope there wasn't something wrong with the pallette of the 60 gig models they had "recently found" at the sonic blue store. My 12 gig model hasn't had ANY problems since I bought it a year ago (except for the volume knob getting loose and not gripping which was pretty much a design oversight). My 60 gig player has had problems with the remote, drive access time, the dimmer. I don't know if I should send it in to get the dimmer looked at or wait until someone knows what the problem is!!!

My 60 GB does the same thing. If I am listening to a continuously mixed album, it frequently pauses up to 3 seconds between tracks -- it's like the next track isn't being cached quickly enough, and the player is waiting for a disk to spin-up. This is a nuisace with the continuously mixed albums. This never happened with my 10 GB player, so I've kind of chalked it up to having 2 disks or something.

I have 26 GB of MP3s (4,400) so only one disk should be full.

This never happened with my 10 GB player, so I've kind of chalked it up to having 2 disks or something.

Nope, it's not supposed to happen regardless of the number of disks. This is puzzling. If you downgrade to 1.03, does the problem go away?

I have 26 GB of MP3s (4,400) so only one disk should be full.

That's not how it works. Please see this FAQ entry.

Tony, you need to change that FAQ entry to allow for the fact that the drive column has gone.

Done.

But I really wanted that feature.

ditto on the problem here. I just started noticing it in b11. can't recall if it was in b7 though...

my dual 30GB rio has 9444 tracks (~35GB) and i notice it more frequently than 30% of the time.

Ha, here it is again! I repeated a short (2:15 @ 128 CBR) tune (using 'repeat', not 'back'), and it paused for perhaps 2 seconds with that new smaller disk icon and 'W'. No serial output. 2.0b11/v225.

I have the same issue. It definately started to take longer to load between SOME songs, not all of them though, once I added another 20 gig drive, to go along with the 10gig i had in there. Does the empeg use one drive only until its filled up? or does it pool both of them together?

Brian

It pools them. See the FAQ entry referenced by Tony up above in this thread.