Can anyone shed light on this problem for me? It's never happened before tonight, so I'm inclined to think that some recent Windows Update has broken something... I'm running WinXP.

Attached is the first error messages I received. Emplode reported:

"Synchronize failed while restarting player. Read on socket failed (error 0x8004003d)

Secondly, I got an ordinary Windows error message before Emplode died:

The instruction at "0x73dd1351" referenced memory at "0x00000004". The memory could not be "read".

Every time I try to do a sync, with or without any changes having been made, it reports similar errors. I'll dig out my serial cable to get a dump of what's going on, but that's going to be at least a couple of days because I lent it to a friend (wonderful timing!) and won't see him again until the weekend.

It's probably been a month or two since the last time I uploaded any songs, but I'll try to use the Windows Restore thingy to roll-back to a suitable time and see if it's any of the recent updates.

For what it's worth, I have my PC and Empeg connected to a Netgear RP114 router, but I haven't noticed any other problems around my internal network. My ISP connection (NTL cable broadband) has been somewhat temperamental over the last couple of weeks but has settled down again (which I've been assuming to be typical NTL quality of service) so there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with the router. I don't have any firewalls installed, and I've just virus checked my network and everything is clean, so it's not that either.

I'm giving up now (after a frustrating evening), but I hope someone can help out!

I'm at work at the moment, and just tried a sync over USB on Win2000. It failed, with an error 0xc004101e (which, I gather from other threads on the board, happens when the drives are mounted read-only). It rebooted part way through the process, for no apparent reason, so that may have been the immediate cause of the error.

Hmm....

It failed, with an error 0xc004101e (which, I gather from other threads on the board, happens when the drives are mounted read-only).

Another possible cause of a read-only drive during synch could be that you're trying to run third-party applications such as Emphatic, Emptris, etc., from the music partitions in AC mode. More information in here.

I wondered about that, but I haven't been running anything since 2.0-final came out (other than Hijack). I've also just upgraded back to a pristine 2.0-final, and the same things are happening.

I'll try to get a serial trace.

I would guess at a (slightly) corrupted database, since the error looks very much like a NULL pointer exception.

Try deleting the existing database files from the player and then re-sync with emplode to generate new ones. In the FAQ, somewhere..

I think we need a FAQ for the FAQ.

Cheers

I would guess at a (slightly) corrupted database, since the error looks very much like a NULL pointer exception.

Good suggestion.

Try deleting the existing database files from the player and then re-sync with emplode to generate new ones. In the FAQ, somewhere..

The entry is here.

Well, it's working again, but I don't know why...

Several months ago I had a few bits and pieces installed, and had set ReserveCache=48 in my config.ini file. I removed that line, and everything is behaving itself again.

Thanks for your suggestions, though.

I think we need a FAQ for the FAQ.

We do: His name's Tony! (Thanks, Tony, for all your diligent work.)

-jk

You're welcome!

And regarding the reservecache line... I don't know how much memory "48" translates into. Anyone?

I don't know how much memory "48" translates into. Anyone?

Looks like someone needs to familiarize himself with "the other FAQ.".

"n = number of chunks to reduce the caching area by Each chunk is reported to be a bit larger than 32kBytes. The player usually reserves 180 chunks (MkII developer image v1.03, this might change in the future and might be different on the MkI or MkIIa) for file caching, and reduces this amount by the value of ReserveCache. If ReserveCache is present, the player reports the size of its file cache upon startup."

So 48 (a value I came up for my own use and just happened to suggest as a starting point, by the way) keeps about 1.5 megs reserved for user apps. emphatic normally only uses 300 or 400k, but I was running other stuff at the time, and noticed no adverse effects, other than the player going to the disk a little more often, which was okay for my purposes.

You're right - I added it when I installed emphatic, the value presumably based on one of your posts. I don't have anything running at the moment (I didn't get round to reinstalling everything when I swapped my primary drive a couple of months ago), so at present it's not needed. Wonder why that was causing my problems, though? Odd that no one else has had similar problems as a result.