Okay, I'm having a few problems with my Rio Receiver that are pretty important.

First off, I have no problems connecting the PC to the Rio Receiver. The blue note is on.

Problems:

1. The only time I can play music on my Rio Reciever, is when I select "Play All Songs". When I select "Artist", and then select a specific track, it sometimes works, or the song info comes ont the screen, but it doesn't play. It works for some tracks and not for others??

2. If I am lucky that day and the track starts to play, or if I select "play all songs" the '>>" button doesn't do anything on the unit. Is it possible to play the next song?

Is there something wrong with my unit?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
BRS

I've never had any of these problems except when there was trouble with the network.

Are you using HPNA, and if so, what kind of card does the PC have plugged into it? What's the wiring in your house like? I gave up on HPNA because there were too many splices and splits in the phone wiring in my house. I just bit the bullet and ran real ethernet to the Receiver. Haven't had any trouble since.

When you select a specific track, is it an actual MP3 file? Does the file check out OK in MP3Trim? What is its bit rate?

__________
Tony Fabris

Thanks for your response. I am using ethernet, cross over cable connecting the device directly to my PC. I didn't think I was having any network problems since the blue note icon shows up on my system tray on the PC.

My MP3's are all at 128k.

What is MP3Trim?

thanks again.

BRS.

MP3trim is a program that (as a side benefit) analyzes the MP3 frames to see if they are damaged. Do a websearch to find it. I think it's at www.logicell.com/~jean , not sure ATM.

The next step is to look at possible networking/cabling/config trouble. The crossover-cable stunt should work, provided that the card is 10baseT (100 is not supported by the receiver). The important thing is to see if you can do OK with the crossover cable to another PC. For example, can you use Windows file sharing to transfer large files between the two PCs using the same cable without it crashing or having errors.



__________
Tony Fabris

Just to note, i've been experienceing the exact same thing, where if i select an artist, the song might play, but if it doesn't, it'll just sit there at 0:00 and pressing >> doesn't do a thing. I haven't had time to mess with it to troubleshoot, but nothing's changed in my computer set up since i installed the reciever, and it's worked fine most of the time.

The one thing i thought of was that maybe the disks were spun down on the server machine, and it was taking a while to spin them up before it could start playing... but i haven't confirmed this.

I know my mp3's are fine, i've mp3Trim checked them and all. Once i get some free time i'll follow up on it some more.

||| loren |||

If you can narrow it down to specific MP3 files, then please send them to us: bugs@empeg.com. If you've got a car player (and I know you have), try playing them with v2.0b3 first.

Alternatively, run the server software with /log:somefile as an argument and send that to me.

Otherwise, if you can reliably reproduce it (and looking at the log files doesn't help), please send me the database files from your installation, and I'll take a look at them. Unfortunately, I won't get much time to look at them, so any other information you can garner will be a great help.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

It happens to many of my MP3's. I would be happy to send them to you. How many should I send.

How do I send you the database from the installation. Where is it located or what is the name of the file?

thanks for any help. This is really frustrating.

Tony-
Last night, I tried MP3trim and the files are all fine. I also tested the card and the cable and they are okay as well.

Could it be a faulty device? Should I try getting a new machine from Rio or is there hope that I can make this current set up work?

thanks everyone.

I wouldn't completely rule out a software bug yet. I've never tried to play a specific song on the receiver before, I only try playing playlists. I just thought we should rule out networking issues first.

__________
Tony Fabris

If it consistently fails on a particular MP3 file, send that file to us. If it's intermittent for a particular MP3, don't bother. Only send me one file that consistently demonstrates the problem.

The database lives in C:\Program Files\Audio Receiver\DB. ZIP it up and send it to me.

Other questions (some of which might seem obvious):
1. Are these files on the same machine as the Audio Receiver Manager software? If not, how are you accessing them? Through Samba? Are they on another Windows box? Did you specify the import path using the UNC path or the drive letter?
2. Do you have any M3U files that might specify these files in strange ways?



Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

by the way, I also had the above problems for playlists as well as trying to play a track after selecting artist. So, the 2 biggest problems so far are:

1. I can't play some tracks (about 50% of about 1000 songs)
2. If it does play a song, I can't advance to the next song in the list.

UGH.

Send me a logfile.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

Thanks Roger for your help.
I'll send you the database and MP3 files tonite. What is your email address?

All of the MP3 files are on the same Windows PC that runs the Audio Receiver Manager software.

I'm sorry, but I don't know what M3U files are?

thx.
BRS
____________________________
In response to:

Poster: Roger
Subject: Re: problems with my Rio Receiver

If it consistently fails on a particular MP3 file, send that file to us. If it's intermittent for a particular MP3, don't bother. Only send me one file that consistently demonstrates the problem.

The database lives in C:\Program Files\Audio Receiver\DB. ZIP it up and send it to me.

Other questions (some of which might seem obvious):
1. Are these files on the same machine as the Audio Receiver Manager software? If not, how are you accessing them? Through Samba? Are they on another Windows box? Did you specify the import path using the UNC path or the drive letter?
2. Do you have any M3U files that might specify these files in strange ways?

roger@empeg.com

If you don't know what M3U files are, you're probably not using them.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

I'll see if i can round something up tonight, after i carve me a pumpkin =].

I just realized that the problem in my case might be caused by accessing the songs that are on a machine seperate from the server. I'll see if i can nail it down tonight. Thanks for the help!!

||| loren |||

Okay, more issues. sorry to bombard you guys.

I decided to do a clean install last night of the Rio Server software (audio reciever manager?). After I did this, I am only seeing the 'red note' icon instead of the blue one. I didn't make any other changes. My ethernet card is working fine and the cable is okay as well. any thoughts.

(by the way, my system is Windows XP)

Another problem that I noticed last night:
I use Real Jukebox. According to Real Jukebox, I have about 1300 tracks on my PC. When I use the Audio Manager software by Rio, and do an 'import tracks' command, it says that I have about 3400 tracks. And, when my Rio did connect to the PC, a lot of tracks were showing up twice on the LCD on the device and not on the PC.

I really appreciate any help. Thanks so much.

BRS

You could simply be running into the known bug where the Receiver softare can't handle a large file database properly. It will be fixed in the next software release.

In the meantime, see if your problem goes away by having the receiver server index a subset of the files instead of the whole collection.

__________
Tony Fabris

I'm thinking it's that bug as well..

I tried and tried to reproduce the bug last night to no avail. The tracks that did it before worked this time. I'll watch out for it when it happens again.

||| loren |||

Are you importing your files from RealJukebox? I found that files recorded in and then imported from RJ failed. But files recorded in RJ but imported from the filesystem worked OK.

I had a conversation with Rio support that you might find interesting if this is the problem you're having:

----

Dear Valued Customer,
We are working on the album playback issues. The Real issue is a little
trickier. There might be a problem with the new codec or the ID3 tags that
newer versions of Real is using. We're working towards a solution. I've
forwarded your comments to the product lead.

Lyndon A.



-----Original Message-----
To: customersupport@sonicblue.com
Subject: RE: Rio Receiver question, Richard Hughes

Thanks. I've tracked the problem down a bit better now.

I didn't realise that Audio Receiver Manager will import both from the
filesystem and directly from the RealJukebox database. Duplicates were being
caused by that. (But to be fair, this is very very sparsely documented, so
it wasn't surprising I got it wrong).

If I turn off RealJukebox, import from the filesystem only, the tracks work,
but as you say, I don't get the playlists.
If I just import from RealJukebox (and not the file system), I get the
playlists, but some tracks don't play properly. Further investigation on
this showed that the tracks that don't play are the ones recorded with
RealJukebox, but tracks recorded with something else do work.
Tracks recorded with RealJukebox *do* work if they are imported from the
filesystem

I also discovered that using MusicMatch format for playlists (.m3u files
listing the filenames) are imported correctly from the filesystem. So I've
turned off RJ, import from the filesystem, and manually create .m3u files
for playlist.

This gives me a workable solution now, but there is definitely an
incompatibility with RealJukebox. It would have all been much easier to work
out if this was documented better (or at all).

Should have added, to turn RealJukebox import off:

"C:\Program Files\Audio Receiver\regsvr32.exe" /u realprv.dll

Richard,
Thanks for your point. I am using Real Jukebox.

How do I "turn it off" and what do you mean by "importing from the file system". Where is that located?

thanks again.
BRS

Turn RJ import off with:

"C:\Program Files\Audio Receiver\regsvr32.exe" /u realprv.dll


What I meant by importing from the filesystem was that when you import music, select the directory the files live in. When RJ is installed, you don't actually need to do this, as it will read it from RJ database instead. But of course when you turn RJ off, you need to point it towards the MP3 files.

Richard