Anyway, now that we're in the public forum, we can discuss it openly and there are lots of people here who could answer how it applies in relation to the empeg car.

My recollection is that it behaves the same way any program that opens a digital file behaves, whether it's a music file or a document or an image file. The code that opens the file simply checks to see whether or not the file is one that it can "play". If not, it doesn't try to open it.

Some systems do a more comprehensive check than others. Poor systems assume that you've supplied a good file and then crash in unusual ways if it's not good. Other systems just glance at the header, while others perform deep and detailed checks. It's all a question of degree, and it's based on whether the programmers think it's likely that the software will get fed a bad file or not.

When such systems detect that they've been fed a bad file, they can either just skip the file without complaining, or they can put up an error. The empeg car has two places where it might detect a non-playable file. The first is when the song is getting loaded onto the player, the second is when the file is played back by the player.

If I recall, the empeg car's loader software (called Emplode) will put up an error and refuse to copy the file onto the player if it detects a bad file. If a bad file somehow makes it past Emplode and onto the player, but the player itself can't play the file, the player will try to skip the file without showing any error screen.

Sometimes a file can be bad in ways that neither emplode nor the player can detect until it's too late. In those cases, the player software usually crashes, the player reboots, and the cycle repeats, and the player gets in an infinite-reboot-loop bug. This is a known issue that's documented here.

Please feel free to post any further questions.