Folks,

I have been working for several months in my spare time on a tool that would provide me with an Empeg with a VGA sized screen, hosted on a PC. I had previously tweaked a VNC server and viewer to do this but was not satisfied with the results (it did work).

I have finally arrived at a point where I am satisfied with the stuff I have come up with. I call it "Empeg Streamer and Controller (EMS&P)" (I am not good at coming up with names). You can see details and download it from http://strobos.cee.vt.edu/EMSC .

Neither my son, girlfriend, or I can make it crash or behave in any way other than the way it should. So it is to the point where testing by others would be greatly appreciated. And if you like it you can continue to use it as it is free.

If you run Windows XP and have the curiosity, please download this thing, take it for a spin, and tell me how it behaves. The application can be used to either control your Empeg, or to stream music from it with the same user interface - one designed to display on a VGA size screen and controlled by short and long presses of only four buttons. Network and CPU utilization on the PC and the Empeg are minimal when controlling the Empeg. When streaming, you do of course use CPU to decode the music, and bandwith to stream the fids.

Of course, the advantage to VNC is that it works on basically anything.

This looks vaguely familiar. Deja vu?

- trs

Edit: Ahhh, I'm not crazy. *phew!*

Sure, VNC works anywhere and practically puts your Empeg on the screen, which is great when your problem is having access to the Empeg. But when you desire a different user interface designed for a bigger screen its a different story.

By the way, thank you very much for providing access to the Empeg cross compilation toolchain in your server. After struggling for weeks to set it up in my machine, unsuceesfully, I really apreciate it.

very nice!

What are the chances of comming up with a vitual command console? It would be very cool to have this set up to remotley control the empeg using a touchscreen monitor on the dash and empeg in the trunk or glove compartment.

Thank you. I have no clue as to how touchscreens work, so I couldnt tell. But I assume they are closer to mice than to keyboards in how the provide input to the application, so it would probably require some work (this thing will allow you to navigate menus with the mouse but it is really designed for press-button use). For now it is necessary to stick to a (steering wheel) ir remote.

This looks great. Just ordered a IRDA receiver to use with my SWI-X. Can't wait to try it out.

No! You are not crazy.

This EMS&P is what I know use instead of the VNC. In addition to a change in aesthetics (I now use margins ) There are many other differences, all of which stem from where the "state" of things is maintained. In VNC, the client is just a viewer of what is happening in the server machine. The client sends keystrokes and mousemoves for the server to interpret and do stuff with. EMS&P uses the Empeg as a music database and as a sound card of sorts (or WinAmp if you are streaming). All state is maintained by EMS&P. It is EMS&P that maintains the running order; enqueing, inserting, replacing, searching, etc. The menu interaction is based on information contained in EMS&P, so it can present nice menus with extra large characters that are not scaled bitmaps of what the Empeg would show. (For some reason I can't capture the screens when showing the menus, would appreciate any help on how to do that...)

EMS&P actually has running order manipulation features that are not present in the Empeg, such as "No more songs like next one...". What is completely different is the search facility, which can do so by searching for matches inside strings, not just at the beginning. Unfortunately, the screen shots of the searching windows are at the end of the web page, so you may have not gotten to see them.

Chances are that if you like the Empeg, you'll like this thing as your desktop music player. At least if you like the Empeg for the reasons I like it, which relate to how I can dynamically choose the music I listen to. If you're into visuals and those kinds of things, then EMS&P is not there yet...

Edit: the VNC mentioned here (http://strobos.cee.vt.edu/EmpegVNC) is one where the state is transfered from the server to the client as information, rather than screen copies. But of course, this could only be done for some things, not the menu interaction.

Just curious, are you going to have a version of this that doesn't require the empeg. (not that I would ever think of getting rid of my empeg )

It wouldn't be too dificult.... I personally don't need one since I've got three of the beloved Empegs. But if there is a demand for it...

By the way, I don't know if you have tried it already and fooled around with the search screens, but I initially posted an executable that starts out with the letter "A" already typed in the search string. There was only one download before I realized this and posted a corrected executable that starts out with an empty search string. Perhaps it was your download?

the app is awesome. im enjoying it so far
a couple things
in control mode, if i bounce really fast from song to song for an extended amount of time it tends to restart my empeg (freeze it, then restart)
also, is it supposed to skip a track when i hit left or right?
if im playing, say, track 39 and hit right it jumps to track 41
if i then hit left it skips back to 39
no matter how much i try i can not get it to hit 40 (or any other even number)
the only way that it hits an even number is if i let it play through a song, but then i cant get any odds
if i hit left, it will never restart the song. just skip back two songs

Thanks for trying EMSC out!

The first thing you observed about rebooting the player when you bounce real fast between songs for extended periods happens because the Empeg player app freezes when overwhelmed with a back log of serial port commands to play. I put in a check in the software to detect this, which forces the Empeg to quit and restart and allows things to continue. I struggled quite a bit with this and that's the best solution I've been able to come up with so far. I don't know if you were doing this as part of a very much appreciated testing, or whether you just like to do that. If you just need to do this from time to time, a way to avoid it, and to switch songs way faster, is to Pause first. Then do next song, prev song, in fast succession (you can just leave the button pressed if it is paused); when you found the song your looking for unpause...

Regarding the right and left key behaviour, the intended behavior (and what I get in my empegs) is that pressing right moves you to the next song, whether it is even or not. Pressing left moves you to the start of the current song if you are past the first four seconds, otherwise it moves you to the previous song. I would like to investigate and correct this behaviour you are observing. Does this also happen in Streaming mode? Does it happen in control mode if you pause before pressing right or left, and then unpause after pressing right or left (n times)? How distant is the Empeg from the computer controlling it (e.g., is the travel time of network packets large)? How fast is your PC?

Thanks again for trying it out and helping me with the testing.

I forgot to ask if you were using the keyboard, or an IR Remote control. If so, does it happen with either?

How distant is the Empeg from the computer controlling it (e.g., is the travel time of network packets large)?

Surely the packets travel at the speed of light, making the length of his network lines insignificant. No?

--Dan.

Sure, I guess I should have used some other term instead of "distance". It is not the same to interact with an Empeg connected directly to your computer, than it is to interact with an Empeg in your office, from home, connected over a dial-up line, during hours of peak traffic. I really mean the effective speed of the link between the Empeg and the controlling PC.

The first thing you observed about rebooting the player when you bounce real fast between songs for extended periods happens because the Empeg player app freezes when overwhelmed with a back log of serial port commands to play. I put in a check in the software to detect this, which forces the Empeg to quit and restart and allows things to continue. I struggled quite a bit with this and that's the best solution I've been able to come up with so far.

If you just need to do this from time to time, a way to avoid it, and to switch songs way faster, is to Pause first.

I'm sure you thought of this, but why not have the empeg pause when it detects this instead of restarting. I'm guessing it's because you can't get the pause command to be put at the head of the queue, but it's worth pointing out if you just missed it for some reason.

Thank you for the comment. When the empeg player app freezes, it will not do a thing. I can't pause, resume, or send a cmd to play anything. In fact, 80% of the time what appears as a freeze is an exit of the player application (if you have serial terminal connected you would see the shell prompt). At that point I send an "exit" to the serial port, which restarts the player exactly where it left off.

When this freeze happens is unpredictable, and something that will very rarely happen if you are just using the application (as opposed to testing it and trying to make it fail). At least in my machines. For example, right now in order to make it happen, I had to press the right button 217 times over a 28 second time frame. I would like to know if it happens in other machines under what would be considered "normal" use.

I thought about doing a Pause behind the scenes prior to a next or previous track command, and a Resume once I detected that no previous or next track button has been pressed for, say, 3/4th sec. But then that meant that I would at least have that lag when changing songs. (The application doesn't inform the Empeg of change in songs while it is paused, only of the then current song when it resumes).

Wow.. I'm putting together a car-pc in the next couple of weeks, and this looks like just the ticket to tie my empeg into my system. I'll try it out and let you know what I think.

I'm guess that the empegLink binary doesn't work with 3.0 a7.

empegLink: connection has been accepted
could not open /empeg/var/database to determine date
empegLink: waiting for a connection

V3's database file is called database3

Got the program running (XP home edition) but can't get certain things to function. I can get the player into search mode and get the menus up. I can also select menu items. I can't unpause my player to get it started, also cannot cursor to letters in search mode. I'll read your webpage more carefully to see if I'm doing things correctly.

Okay, when I select playlists, no lists come up. If I enter search mode all the letters are darkened. I don't think I'm actuallu interacting with the Empeg. The only thing I'm wondering about so far is: could fidsort somehow interfering with the program. I did install FIDSIFT.SH, don't know if that would be a proble or not. Don't know enough to be sure, but though I'd throw it out there as the only thing I can think of so far.

Thank you for letting me know. I have never worked with anything but 2.0 final. So I have no clue as to what is going on. There is a lot about the Empeg side of things (EmpegLink) that relies on Fids, and certain information layout in empeg_state, hda3 and empeg_notify. EmpegLink doesn't actually look at the content of the database file except to look at its date and use that to determine whether EMSC needs to rebuild its database.

Could you please copy Database3 to Database (or just create any file called Database), so that EmpegLink can find it and get a date, and let me know if the other things work by doing this under 3.0? If it does work I'll have EmpegLink look for database3 if it doesn't find database.

If the layout of dev/empeg_state, dev/hda3, and /proc/empeg_notify has changed... then I'll need to work a lot to make this compatible with software version 3.0...

Thank you for both observations. When you first ran EMSC, did you see a flying list of all your playlists in the middle of the screeen, and a count-up of all your tunes in the title bar? This is a process that takes 2 or 3 minutes with my 5,000 songs. Also, you can check the size of the file named "Empeg.your.ip.address.PlayerDB" in the directory where you installed EMSC. If it is zero length, then EMSC is not being able to recreate your playlists from the content of the FIDS in /drive0/fids and /drive1/fids.

Based on what you are describing, all of the above is happening. The reason all the letters in the search are dimmed is because there are no character choices available that would refine your search further, since EMSC doesnt know about any of your songs. There is probably a single match in the search window that reads "all 0 songs in 0 matches" when you start out.

I don't know what fidsift.sh is. EMSC expects your FIDS to be either in /drive0/fids/ or /drive1/fids. I believe that if you use the new organization of fids with more subdirectories, HIJACK will take care of things and make applications think that they are available from one of those two locations.

One more thing, when you are in the main menu, does the "up" key allow you to navigate up in the menus? Cause the Pause UnPause not working is probably just that EMSC doesnt know about any of your songs.

Don't give up on this. Well make it work.

OK. I think you were right regarding the Fidsift.sh thing. I searched for it and found a post by Mark where he said the automatic translation worked only through /empeg/fids0/ and /empeg/fids1/, and not through /drive0/fids and /drive1/fids which is what EmpegLink was using. I recompiled using /empeg/fids?/ and it works the same for me (i dont use fidsift.sh). But it will probably now work for you as well. Please check it out. The new EmpegLink is attached. I also updated the distribution files. Hope this change doesnt break anything....

Edit: Important - Before running EMSC again after installing the new EmpegLink, make sure you delete the zero length "Empeg.your.empeg.ip.addr.PlayerDB" file that was created in the EMSC directory, or that you run EMSC with the "-r" option.

Ok, i just copied my database3 to database. The EMS&C program loaded this time, loaded up exactly 2400 of my 7000 tracks, then locked up.

r7 : 0200006e r6 : 00000000 r5 : 00000000 r4 : 0200006e
r3 : 00000000 r2 : b7340200 r1 : 00010000 r0 : 0200006e
Flags: NzCv IRQs on FIQs on Mode USER_32 Segment user
Control: C0CB517D Table: C0CB517D DAC: 00000015
Function entered at [<4006ac24>] from [<4006adf4>]
Function entered at [<4006add8>] from [<4006b060>]
r10 = 400FF128 r8 = 00000000 r7 = 0200006E r6 = 00000000
r5 = 00000000 r4 = 0200006E
Function entered at [<4006afe8>] from [<4006456c>]
r4 = BFFFF8C8
Function entered at [<40060d78>] from [<40064e1c>]
r10 = 400FF128 r9 = 02001AC4 r8 = 02003104 r7 = 0200083C
r6 = 00000001 r5 = 00000004 r4 = 00000000
Function entered at [<40064e08>] from [<40064e3c>]
Function entered at [<40064e24>] from [<020015a8>]
Function entered at [<020013ac>] from [<020024c0>]
r4 = 00000000
Function entered at [<02002084>] from [<02001eac>]
r6 = 4000C2A8 r5 = 00000001 r4 = BFFFFE74
Function entered at [<02001ac4>] from [<40037040>]
Function entered at [<40036ee4>] from [<02000ac8>]
r10 = 4001D858 r9 = 00000000 r8 = 00000000 r7 = 00000000
r6 = 02000AA4 r5 = 00000000 r4 = 4001E5EC

I also had a couple of these before it crashed, but hyperterm won't let me scroll up at all without scrambling all the text

Could not open Fid datafile, probably bad FID:y Erik Stahlman (erik@vt.edu)
/drive1/fids/40c1

Could not open Fid datafile, probably bad FID:, ATA DISK drive
/drive1/fids/6a31x000-0x007,0x038

Thanks Jules, I'll try that out and let you know. I have some other thoughts but I'll way and try your suggestions first.

Jules, it is working better. The only thing now is that it only loaded 3 songs out my entire database. When I do select one of those songs all the functioons do work however. It's getting close ! My alternative solution is to remove fidsift and see what happens, but if you'd like to straighten this out with fidsift than I'm more than willing. If so, just let me know what you want to try next. (FYI: I reloaded your 2 disk verson of empegVNC, just for kicks, and it still doesn't work. I have a feeling that this is a related problem).

Rtundo,

Thanks for trying. I just realized that I accessed the FIDS in two locations of my code, but only fixed on of those. So after the fix I was able to access the tune fids but not the playlist fids. Here is yet another EmpegLink file that will hopefully completely solve the problem.

Your reasoning with regards to VNC is correct. The code that looks for fids is the same as in EMS&C, althought I did not make the last modifications to that one. Will correct and upload later today, will let you know. But hopefully EMS&C will work this time with the newest EmpegLink, attached.