I re-packaged up Palantir with some easier install instructions. The webpage is here, so if you were hesitant to install before, it's just a little bit easier. You don't have to recompile the kernel, I've included a pre-compiled one on the install page.

I re-packaged up Palantir with some easier install instructions.

Okay, I do have to ask.. Where did the name come from?

Cool looking program though, I will have to try it shortly.

Me.

thanks, I think ill give it a shot now.

See Here

A few impressions so far...

Firstly, very very cool idea!

Problems I found are:

1. It seems to assume all albums are by a single artist. I have a number of compilation albums that consist of multiple artists, and I'm not sure how to sort these in the CSV file?

2. It's skipping about half of my songs. Could this be because about that many are missing one or more of genre, year, track number, and (in the case of singles) source.

3. The PDB file isn't uploading fully to my Palm. This could be a problem with my setup, but I've not had difficulty before, so is it possible that a partially corrupt PDB file is being generated?

Let me know if I can supply any more details that might help - I'd love to get this working properly.

Quick update - PDB file worked second time I tried uploading, so it looks like a glitch on my system - sorry.

1. It seems to assume all albums are by a single artist. I have a number of compilation albums that consist of multiple artists, and I'm not sure how to sort these in the CSV file?

Right now, you will have to sort them with everything else, by Artist. The album won't stick together, because the interface itself is hardcoded to be grouped by Artist, then grouped by Album, etc. It was a decision I had to make based upon the limitations of the Palm platform and the .pdb format. Generally, most of your albums will not be compilation albums anyway, but I will look into this later as a possible feature (grouping by album).

2. It's skipping about half of my songs. Could this be because about that many are missing one or more of genre, year, track number, and (in the case of singles) source.

Yes. You can see in the java code that if I don't have exactly 9 comma separated values per line, it skips that line. This is because creating the .pdb file from a .csv file is not going to be the way to create your database, it will be an option in Jemplode, and I did not want to waste time coding for all the limitations of a .csv file. Mike Schrag is working on releasing a new version of Jemplode with an updated internal node structure very soon, and as soon as that happens, I will modify that code to work directly from Jemplode. Then you will get all of your tracks, regardless of how you have tagged them.

As an aside, I have all my tracks tagged with [Single] for album if there is none, and in extreme cases [Unknown].

3. The PDB file isn't uploading fully to my Palm. This could be a problem with my setup, but I've not had difficulty before, so is it possible that a partially corrupt PDB file is being generated?

I saw that you fixed this, but I had to make sure that nothing else was interfering with my Serial port before uploading could occur successfully. My .pdb file is over 400k, so it takes a long time, but my IR port on my laptop was causing it to blow out around 100k. If anyone has problems Synching, it can probably be googled for and solved easily that way.

Also, when I compose a playlist on the Palm and beam it to the empeg, it inserts the files rather than creating a new playlist - is this intentional? Can this be changed somehow?

Thanks for clearing those things up. My 'Palm' is actually a Sony Clie, and was the first PDA Sony released, so it's not 100% perfect for connecting to the desktop machine.

If I get time tomorrow, I might put a little Java program together that will attempt to convert the CSV format that JEmplode gives to the CSV format your csv2pdb program expects - I'd probably get it to fill in blank values with something so that it will stop skipping half my songs too

Also, when I compose a playlist on the Palm and beam it to the empeg, it inserts the files rather than creating a new playlist - is this intentional? Can this be changed somehow?

This is the way it's supposed to work. Creating a new playlist on the Empeg would be a little more complicated, I'd have to write to the Player DB and do a bit more than I've focused on for this project. My intention was to satisfy passengers and myself when they ask me "What songs do you have?" and also "Can you play this, then this, then this". Just an easier way to browse and insert songs than using the front buttons (I've screwed up my playlists many times by replacing, not inserting songs).

Later I'll modify it so you can insert/append/replace/enqueue, but I probably won't work on creating a new playlist that will be avialable in the menus.

Sorry, should have made that clearer - by new playlist, I meant to replace the existing playing songs with the beamed songs - obviously creating a new permanent playlist available via the menu system would be a much greater task, mounting the player in RW, and other various Bad Things.

Very impressed with it though - can't stop beaming