*new user alert*
Just got my empeg on Monday. I loaded some music and things worked flawlessly. Then I deleted everything and reloaded different stuff. Now, the track time just sits at "0:00" and doesn't advance. It worked fine the first time I used it. I obviously reset something somewhere? How do I get the track time working again? I'm using the scrolling line at the bottom for display.

thanks.

-gbeck

#080000480
18GB Red, Waiting for Amber screen...

Do you mean that the songs play, but the track time doesn't change on the screen?

Or do you mean that the songs don't even play at all?

If you mean that the track time doesn't change on the screen, that's gotta be a bug, report it to bugs@empeg.com.

If you mean that there's nothing playing after you load up new music: That's normal. After a synchronization, it boots up with no playlists playing at all. Just use the menus to choose a playlist and it will start playing it. A quick way to do this is to press the bottom button three times, and it will play all of your playlists.

___________
Tony Fabris

The track time currently doesn't work right for VBR files.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

Greetings!

Are there any other known problems with VBR? I will be uploading about 17GB worth of VBR encoded files as
my first load into the planned 36GB empeg. Is there anything I should be watching out for?

Paul G.
Q# 15189

Do you mean that the songs play, but the track time doesn't change on the screen?

Yes, that is precisely what I mean. But as roger pointed out, track time doesn't currently work for VBR-encoded files, and these are VBR files. I just confirmed it works for statically encoded files.

I didn't file it as a bug since I figured the bug was with me until proven otherwise, I've only had it a couple of days, which means about five or six hours of use, most of which has been consumed downloading files.

thanks for the help.

-gbeck

#080000480
18GB Red, Waiting for Amber screen...

As I recall, there's some general weirdness in the area of fastforwarding and rewinding within a track.

Don't let this discourage you from uploading your VBR files, however. I'm not aware of any other problems with these files.

We're on the case, and the problems with VBR should be fixed soon.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

The track time currently doesn't work right for VBR files.

That's funny. The track times work just great for my VBR files. They're not particularly accurate, but at least the time advances without sitting at zero.

Is it possible that different VBR encoders write out different kinds of data to the files, and that some will show proper track times on the empeg, and others won't?

And to pgrzelak:

VBR files work fine on the Empeg. There is currently a small bug where FF and REW don't work perfectly with all VBR files. If you fast-forward or rewind in a VBR file, there is a chance it might only go to a certain point in the song and then just stick there, not going any farther. But that's only a problem with FF and REW, it isn't a problem if you're just playing a song.

And, as Roger said, they're working on getting VBR files to behave perfectly. That will happen pretty soon.


___________
Tony Fabris

But as roger pointed out, track time doesn't currently work for VBR-encoded files

Well... actually Roger (and Tony) pointed out, track time doesn't work properly on VBR files. The only problems I have observed with track times and VBRs is that they are not always accurate, but usually only a few seconds off. However, they do work.

If your track time always reads 0:00, then something is wrong.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

My track times are "0:00", they just don't work. I'll have to experiment more to ensure that this is restricted only to VBR files. Most of my VBR files were created with AudioCatalyst (at least the ones with 0:00 times).

I can undertand that total track time for a VBR file won't be terribly accurate, as it would need to predict the effective average bit rate for the encoding. WinAmp does this dynamically. My problem is the elapsed time is just zero. This shouldn't be a function of the bit rate at all, or at least it need not be, it's just a simple tick counter from the start of a track.

I think the display I am using is Info:Line or something like that. Track name scrolls at the bottom and elapsed time counter is at the bottom right corner.

-gbeck

#080000480
18GB Red, Waiting for Amber screen...

Greetings!

Very cool. I just spent two months encoding my CD collection, and I would hate to have to repeat that task!!!
Thanks!

Paul G.
Q# 15189
Status: In queue for a green 36GB Mk2

I tried to allude to this in another post, perhaps Roger will jump in with a more accurate explanation...

Your "0:00" track times might be a result of your encoder. Which one were you using?

See, as I understand it, VBR files are supposed to contain some sort of additional data (I forget what this data is called or where it is located in the file) which helps player software seek into the file. Maybe the xaudio library depends heavily upon this data, and your encoder just isn't writing that information to the files.

Then again, I could be completely wrong about all of this, I'm unclear on it.

___________
Tony Fabris

The only problems I have observed with track times and VBRs is that they are not always accurate, but usually only a few seconds off.

Just yesterday I had quite a fun time watching the elapsed time jumping backwards and forwards more than a minute! It also gets very confused sometimes after rebooting the player. Essentially the current track starts again at the beginning, but the elapsed time shows something like 3000 minutes. I expect all of this will go away with the new VBR stuff.

Richard.

Hm. Weird.

Most of the music on my player is encoded using VBR and I've never seen any problem with the timer screwing up. I use Audio Catalyst.

- Jon

Xing, in their grand tradition of mangling standards to suit their own (insidious) purposes, includes a single non-standard frame at the start of a VBR file to tell a Xing decoder the effective bit rate and length of song so it can work out the time display. Naturally this got reverse engineered so WinAmp and everyone else could understand it. I've switched to using LAME and it has the option to include the Xing VBR header. (Or, more accurately, you can set an option which tells it to not put the VBR header in).

Theoretically, as long as you don't want to know how long the song is before you play it, you can do an accurate time display by starting from zero and incrementing the time display by one 75th of a second for each frame processed. (75 frames per second, you see). Most decoders (used to) cheat by determining the bit rate from the first block and then using their absolute byte position in the file to determine their time offset.

empeg could do a scan of the file as it was being downloaded (or in the background on the player immediately after download) to determine the length of the song and write this into the song's database header. They may already do this.

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

If the track time reads 0:00, this means that the VBR file is corrupt - actually, the total frame count value has not been set in the VBR header. Due to a bug in Xaudio VBR support, it won't count up if it doesn't know how long the track is.

Our VBR code doesn't suffer from this, but total track time won't work either - you need to fix your files. Audiocatalyst seems to do this sometimes, it did it on a lot of my files. Mike wrote a tool to recalculate the VBR header & fix it, but it's not an app yet.

Hugo

Track times work for me as well. I think it is because the encoder I used and most likely you used creates an xing VBR header which I believe states the average bitrate of the song. I did a little test and encoded a file VBR and suppressed that header and the counter would fluctuate and even decrease at times, but not just sit at zero.

-Finally received my Mark2 no thanks to customs.

We've had a play, and we suspect that installing RealJukebox breaks Audiocatalyst with regard to VBR headers.

Can anyone else confirm/refute this?



Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

Can anyone else confirm/refute this?

I can confirm that VBR is broken for me for AudioCatalyst, and that I do have Real Jukebox also installed. I'll have to uninstall both and re-install AC and see what happens, unless you can suggest a simpler test.

-gbeck

#080000480
18GB Red, Waiting for Amber screen...

We've had a play, and we suspect that installing RealJukebox breaks Audiocatalyst with regard to VBR headers.

Can anyone else confirm/refute this?

Bingo! I uninstalled RealJukeBox and AudioCatalyst, then re-installed AudioCatalyst. Encoded a VBR track, now Empeg displays track elapsed time just fine. I don't notice any "jumping" of the elapsed time either.

Another interesting tidbit is that "before" WinAmp would display a total track time of 0:00, then when the track was played would estimate the total track time as it played. This total time jumped around a lot, and settled down as more of the track played. However, now (without Real
JukeBox installed), WinAmp correctly displays track times just when the track is dragged/dropped, and the time doesn't jump around as the track plays.

Now, how do I fix up the 70+ VBR-encoded CDs that I encoded using AC/xing with Real Jukebox installed?

-gbeck

#080000480
18GB Red, Waiting for Amber screen...

we suspect that installing RealJukebox breaks Audiocatalyst with regard to VBR headers.

Roger,

Gary's answer to your note seems to confirm what you said. He wrote:
Bingo! I uninstalled RealJukeBox and AudioCatalyst (...)now Empeg displays track elapsed time just fine.

Can you explain if it is indeed RealJukebox that breaks things, or does Audiocatalyst play outside established rules? Who's to blame??




Henno
mk2 6 nr 6

AudioCatalyst was bought by Real, so presumably they've "leveraged" the AC encoder for RJ. Obviously, they've broken it. I emailed Real about it the other day, when we figured it out, but I doubt there'll be any reply for a couple of weeks.

Some companies just aren't as customer-facing as others .



Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

I had the problem where my VBR header was corrupt. I believe the VBR header will contain an "average bit rate" that players can use to calculate total track time. Mine were zero, and empeg car would display track times of zero. See other parts of thread for the cause (conflict with AudioCatalyst and other SW).

There is a way to fix these files. The 1.01 release notes mention that MP3 Tag Studio version 2 can fix these files, but it hasn't been verified yet. I just downloaded version 2, and it indeed does fix this problem, at least for me.
You can get Mp3/Tag Studio here.

-gbeck

#080000480
18GB Red, Waiting for Amber screen...