And you're sure the loudness setting, or the EQ parameters, or the Hijack bass/treble settings didn't change with the upgrade?

And you're sure the loudness setting, or the EQ parameters, or the Hijack bass/treble settings didn't change with the upgrade?

Yep, I reset everything to be sure (I use the flat EQ setting and have everything else off aside from auto volume adjustment so there isn't much to get messed up).

-Mike

Has anybody noticed a problem with the Oscilloscope Zoom visual with alpha5? The empeg keeps resetting whenever I select it, so I removed it from my favourates... I get no problems with it in alpha3 though. Not really a big deal, I was just wondering if anybody else was seeing it.

Has anybody noticed a problem with the Oscilloscope Zoom visual with alpha5?

Yep, I've got that one too. I was wondering what was causing that (I have the visuals set to autochange and I hadn't figured out which one was the culprit). Also noticing that Info:Transient doesn't really work (the info line doesn't show for more than half a second).

Should we be posting these things in bugs or do the empeg guys not want to hear from us until they release a real beta?

-Mike

Ya need to get the database into sufficient shape that it will reboot (power cycle) into v3alpha3 without rebuilding every boot. Once that works, I'd expect v3alpha5 to work as well for you as it does for me/Rob.

Just for kicks, I did the following:
-stop the (alpha 3) player
-rw
-rm the database3 file
-start the alpha3 player
-let it finish building
-stop the alpha3 player
-ro
-reboot
-alpha3 rebuilds the database

I then repeated above, adding 1 step: sync with jemplode between "ro" and "reboot".
-alpha3 sees valid database

-stopped alpha3 player
-rw
-replaced alpha3 with alpha5 player
-ro
-reboot
-alpha5 "rebuilds" database, finds no music

-stop alpha5 player
-rw
-put back alpha3 player
-ro
-reboot

and all is well again (no rebuild, music's there)

So if it works for you and rob (and others), I'm unlucky, or something's different about my player. I'm fidsifted, I have hijack 347, and have ~12000 songs.

Has anybody noticed a problem with the Oscilloscope Zoom visual with alpha5?

Haven't noticed that one yet, but I did find that if you use LogDiff with info set to "Transient" then the text is screwed up. That is, it's only visible at the edges of the screen, right and left, as if there was a blank image plane in front of it that covered everthing but a 1-pixel wide row on each side.

I too confirm no change occurred in those. I had to lower the eq by two points in the first four bars on the left. Loudness set to 0 as usual, hijack set to "flat" for bass and threble.

I finally have my empeg up and running software version 3.0a5. It was running alpha3 for quite some time without problems.

After installing the new alpha version the player always crashed (seg fault) while selecting another playlist. First I thought the problem is the know problem that this version is not able to create database. But reinstalling alpha3 and rebuilding the database did not solve the problem. (alpha3 worked, alpha5 don’t)

The solution was to reduce the cache the player software uses. I originally used the setting resevercache=16, for the alpha5 I have to use the setting resevercache=8.
Seems the new alpha consumes more resources for cache and playlists. I experienced this with my MK2 Player (12MB RAM) and about 5000 songs loaded.

Also I notice the following changes since alpha3:
- Definitely better sound quality (at least with my sound system)
- Beeps does not seems to work anymore
- Pitchbend is delayed by about 3 seconds
- Player seems to consume more memory (see above)

But thanks anyway for releasing software for a long discontinued product!

I can confirm after my today's upgrade to alpha5 the better sound quality. Much better...

bye

It's the other way around actually The reservecache setting tells the player to not grab as much memory. Higher the number = less the player gets. The difference between 8 and 16 isn't much though, it's only about 256K. Every byte counts I guess when you've only got 12MB to play with!

Could be useful for the other people that have issues with alpha5

Okay then, I've had 2.final on for a bit. I'm off to Lincoln for new years with my folks. I've decided to give 3 alpha 5 a try....

Wish me luck! It'll be a long drive to lincoln if it doesn't work....

Does anyone know where I can download v3 alpha 3? I can't find it (just rebuilt my pc and I fear that I lost the upgrade file)... Anyway had alpha 3 loaded and working, tried the upgrade to Alpha 5 and my database didn't show up. Anyway I'm back at 2.0 but I'd like to at least have v3 alpha 3.

The user KoS appears to have it on his website.

http://kos.li/empeg/images/v3.00-alpha3/

So I have been using alpha 5 for a couple of days and I have to say it is much better. Alpha 3 was a train wreck on my Empeg, for whatever reason, but Alpha 5 solves most of the glaring problems (and of course creates a couple of new ones, but what can you do? ) . Responding to buttons is much faster, crossfading works better, the power-on volume ramp works again, and I have not heard any songs skipping around. Stability is the one thing I am a little unsure about. Alpha 3 was very intermittantly crash prone, forcing me to pull it out and pop it back in again a couple of times a week. Alpha 5 has crashed on me once, but at least it rebooted on its own, which is an improvement. But only one crash in the last week is pretty decent compared to Alpha3. All in all, I have been very happy with it, and will be even more so when they get the database rebuild thing worked out.

Awesome, thanks

Hijack v348 is now available.

The only change is a small fix for the "PrevVisual" function for v3alpha5, similar to the earlier workaround for v3alpha3.

Bugs in v3alpha5:

• No database rebuilds
• INFO:TRANSIENT: doesn't enlarge the visual to 100% after the info line disappears.
• Missing the "Previous Visual" keycode (originally added in v2rc1).
  

Also, generally speaking it seems to me visuals are more responsive to music. I have been using Alpha5 for a week now and I am quite happy with it, too.

I've had alpha 5 on my main unit for a couple of days now and i think something is seriously wrong. Everything sounds hollow/out-of-phase/weird... It sounded perfectly good on v2. I did fiddle with the stereo enhancement feature, that is, I tried to enable it but it wouldn't go on. Could it be that it's actually now stuck in the 'on' mode? Other than that, a few reboots to report.

"Stereo Enhancement" ? Is this like a similated surround sound?

Any plans for a Beta 3.0 for Valentine's Day?

Hey this is interesting. I actually cannot decide whether I like it better or not. As I said I had to lower the bass frequencies and while on some mp3s I like it better now, on some other I kind of prefer it as it was in Alpha3...

I think that's it, marria01. I went back to alpha3, tried to change the stereo separation (menu->sound->Stereo separation->ALl Tracks) and - guess what - I got the same sound as alpha 5. The change takes place few seconds after you actually click on the button to activate it.
In Alpha5, there's no way to switch it off, simply. That's my impression, at least, but to me it really seems that's what's happening.

Thanks for pointing this out, marria01.

So, now I think I am staying back with Alpha3. Unfortunately it locks so frequently...

Aha. Very interesting! So that explains it.

For the record, what the stereo separation does is this:

Let's say you've got a Beatles track or some other similar track where the voice is panned hard left and the instruments are panned hard right.

If you listened to that with a pair of regular speakers, you'd get an interesting stereo sensation, because both ears would get a bit of each speaker. If you listened to it with headphones, then it would be jarring because each ear is totally discrete.

What the stereo separation feature does is to mix the left and right channels back a bit towards center, so that if you were listening with headphones it would sound more like regular speakers would.

Also, if I recall correctly, it slightly delays the leftchannel mix as it goes into the right ear, and vice-versa, so that it simulates the extra time it would have taken for the sound from the left speaker to reach your right ear.

(Please note that this feature is available on some very expensive audiophile headphone amplifiers, for the same reasons.)

So, I would guess that doing this might cause certain frequencies to be enhanced more than they would otherwise be with a regular stereo field. The bass I would think would be most noticeably different because of the lack of phase cancellation.

Very interesting.

Well v3 (both alphas) definitely sound different. There is significantly more bass. I don't know if I would call the changes better as I haven't adjusted my eq/amps to compensate yet. I was actually going to ask if that added bass was going to stay before I readjust everything.

Agree completely, Rob -- I haven't even tried v3.00a5 yet, but *I* noticed a huge difference in my In-Car audio from 2.00 to 3.00a3. (In case it really is a bug, Once I upgraded, all my EQ's displayed flat. however, it sounded like my EQ was still actually loaded.)

Me.

[Edit: Oh, and all Hijack settings and Loudness, even HiJacks' AutoVolumne Adjust is off.]

What's the easiest way to reset the various settings in player. I'm wondering if the player is parsing the settings and mistakenly enabling the separation feature.

Hopefully a new option in Hijack, unless our friends in Cambridge decide to release a beta or an alpha 7 soon? I don't know if it's worthed to do any such thing. Just an idea I am passing on to our HiJack Master

It seems like that alpha5 isn't updating the play count. Has anyone else noticed that?

--Nathan

Just so everybody catches this, from the Alpha 5 readme:

* What's New Since 3.00-alpha3 - Player

Now drops samples after an abrupt transition to silence in the last fraction
of a second of audio (to assist with gapless playback).

Dude! This is very cool, it works perfectly. I just tried Pink Floyd's DSOM today, and it was absolutely flawless. That was one of the first rips that I ever encoded, and I do not think I have listened to it without gaps in 5 years. It was a very nice treat, thank you very much. This feature alone makes upgrading to Alpha 5 so worth it.

Incidentally, this feature came over from the Karma, where we've had it for a little while...

Incidentally, this feature came over from the Karma, where we've had it for a little while...

Shame it doesn't work then, I just listened to my '2 many DJs' disc again under v3 and it's cutting the ends of the songs off. These --nogap'ped files worked perfectly under v2. Methinks i'll drop back to v2 soon.

wow, just started to experiment with ogg files right now. sound much better (albeit, its partly because that ogg and flac files don't suffer from the stereo seperation bug), i've found that the controls are laggy. when i used hijack's vitalsigns, i saw that the load was peaking at 7.5 and averaging 4.5 when playing files encoded w/ -q7.