Well, heck, things have been kinda quiet around here recently, so let's "kick it up a notch!"

(please read the text below thoroughly before paging down to the links... you were warned.)


Announcing emphatic v2.00

emphatic is a frontend application for the empeg car player. Its first purpose in life was to scroll lyrics across the empeg screen synchronized with your music. Since then, it's grown into what I consider a fully functional replacement user interface for the player application.

It's been about a year and a half since the last emphatic release, so there are a LOT of changes. I can't possibly cover them all, but here are just a few of the things you can do with emphatic:

• control the way your track information is displayed on the empeg display with custom display modes
• display ID3v2 fields not normally available in player info modes
• select a specific visual to be shown for each custom display mode
• display song lyrics synchronized with the music, and scrolled in horizontal or vertical fashion
• customize your player's menu system, putting menu options where you want them
• assign ratings to your music and use the song rating data in weighted shuffle modes
• perform searches of your music library without the use of a remote control
  

The requirements for running emphatic are

• player software v2 or v3
• Hijack v400+
  

emphatic comes with Windows and Unix installation scripts, which should help you get things configured. The configuration steps are documented on the emphatic web page, so take a look there before you start so that you understand what you're doing when you go to install. The program ships with a sample configuration XML file which should work for most people, however, a couple of the display modes in the sample XML make use of player fonts that don't ship with all versions of the player. As I have not yet received permission to redistribute empeg player fonts, you'll have to get these on your own if you want to use them, at least for now.

I think you'll find emphatic v2.00 is a very large step forward in terms of new functionality, but along with new functionality comes new bugs. While it's gone through a few cycles of alpha testing, I can assure you there are still bugs. I don't personally like calling general public releases "beta," but I would say v2.00 "final" is "beta quality" software, so please be patient if you find there are bugs. Take a look at the "known issues" section of the web page for more info on what's known to be "not quite right."

And, of course, because emphatic's job in life is to give you access to things you were never able to do, sometimes, that means doing things the empeg lads didn't think we'd be doing. emphatic reads a lot of internal player data, and it even writes to the player's dynamic data partition. So keep this in mind as you play with it, and understand that, although I and my alpha testers have done what we can to ferret out bugs, there might be some left, and there is a remote possibility these bugs would cause data loss on your empeg.

Whew, enough disclaiming... On to the next big announcement...


Announcing lrcDB

So, now that you've got this great little application capable of displaying synchronized song lyrics, where are you going to get the lyrics? That's where lrcDB comes in. lrcDB is a website that I've developed as a central repository for sharing time-tagged lyrics, sometimes referred to as LRC files. The site is still very much under development, and I've still got some bugs to squash, but it's at a point now where I feel comfortable opening it to the members of this BBS.

Lyrics can be uploaded and downloaded via the lrcDB website, or via a soon-to-be-released version of the SYLT Lyrics Plugin for Winamp written by the empeg BBS' own elperepat.

Sharing lyrics requires registering on the lrcDB site, but you won't be asked for any more information than you were when you registered on this BBS. Please use your empeg BBS username at lrcDB so we know who you are!


And, oh yeah, on a personal note...

As mentioned in the subject line, this is my 5,000th post to the BBS. It really does seem like it was yesterday that I was browsing Hugo's mp3mobile webpage, lusting after the prospect of having my mp3 collection travel with me in the car, and being able to read track information on that cutting-edge text-only screen!

Nearly five years later, I seem to have found a bit of an online home on this BBS, and not just because I love my car stereo. This BBS is, and has always been, a wonderful place to pass the time talking about anything and everything. My volume of posts is a sign that I either have a serious mental problem, or this BBS is something very special. Or both, but let's not get into that now.

So, with the rest of this 5,000th post, I just want to thank everyone I've had the chance to interact with on these forums. I haven't yet had the chance to meet any of you in person, but some day I'll find a meet that doesn't conflict with a vacation or a family wedding. I've had a great time throughout my first 5,000 posts here, and I'm really looking forward to the next 5,000. Thanks, everybody.

Oh, yeah, you probably want those links to emphatic and lrcDB!

Yay! Congrats on the release and thanks for all the work. Not to mention finishing lrcDB.

Oh, and Happy 5000th!

Enjoy your time off!

I would like to echo Donato's Yay! Emphatic has always been a hit in my car - not so much for me when driving, but for the occupants, and for any of us when stationary. Excellent work.

Also frightning when I think I am only just heading up for 1000 posts, and mine are mostly content free. Well done fella!

Here's to many more like you, dude!

Congratulations!

You've left me with a dilemma though. I'm going on a week long road trip in 2hours. I wish Mark had finished implementing menu_exec...

id like to use my 1,000th post to congratulate you. i just got to work, so i cant try it out, yet. but i already know that lrcDB is pretty kick ass. thanks for your hard work. guess i should start contributing lyrics.

Milestones all around! Congratulations!

BTW, I'm going to be out of town for almost a week, so if there are any bugs, they'll probably have to wait until I get back. I will probably pop in on the BBS a couple times though, so please post bugs, comments, criticisms, suggestions, etc. here and I'll be sure to address them here.

Arghh, you've just completely destroyed any productivity I may have had for the remainder of the morning Cheers, and thanks. Tony (the other Tony) gave a bit of a demo of one of the v2 empatic alphas at one of the meets and I've been impatiently waiting for the release ever since.

Now if we can just get the empeg guys the release alpha 8...

-Mike

For what its worth I had to manually set the drives in my empeg to rw, the install script failed. You might want to try calling 'site exec rw' and 'site exec rwm' instead of just 'site rw' which for some reason doesn't work on my empeg (maybe related to me running ext3?).

-Mike

And here is an OS X binary of lrctool if anybody needs it. Not well tested, but worked for the one song I tried it on.

-Mike

Another minor installer annoyance. I told it not to set ReserveCache because I already had it set and it cleared my existing setting.

-Mike

Yup -- the Hijack rw/ro commands are ext2-specific. I'll add ext3 for those in v402 shortly.

-ml

The stock empeg scripts for "rom" and "rwm" are WWAAAYYYYY slower than the Hijack built-ins (as in tens of seconds slower). v402 will be out shortly with support for ext3 on the site ro/rw commands.

Cheers

I'm so stoked.. Of course last night I rebuild my drive to try to fix the problems with syncing that I was having (working perfect so far BTW), and now once I add lyrics I will have to upload them again! Then I pulled my dash apart to add an extension to the Mic jack and the Aux in jacks to my glove box, and this distracts me... Way to go!

(Aww... you got credit for uploading Boy and October to lrcDB... That puts my numbers down.. Time to tag!)

Quote:
I will correct that now that you're registered. I needed test lyrics so I used a lot of the ones that were uploaded to RiCiN's FTP site, along with a bunch I found on the net way back when.

It's not a big dieal...

So, lets say we upload a lrc and later realize we screwed something up. How can we get these edited/changed on lrcDB?

Tony,

first let me thank you very much for your dedication in making emphatic. It's because people like you that we can use our Empeg to the maximum. Unfortunelly I'm having a little trouble installing it using the bat file. Everything seems to work well and I got no error messages but when I reboot the player there's no emphatic on the Hijack menu. So I checked the config.sys and the installation did not change anything there. I tried to insert a command line myself in config.sys but did not work too. Any tips?

Thanks a lot again.

Ricardo

If you are attempting to make changes to config.sys, but they don't "Take" then the cause is: Already having a third-party application running at synch time or at the time the drives were mounted RO/RW, which prevents the mount from working and screws everything up. Please do this.

Thanks Tony,

I allready tried your solution but did't work. I don't know if I was clear (my English is not too good), but I can change the Config.sys. The install bat of Emphatic can't. If you can send me the lines that the bat put in config.sy I can try to put in myself.

Thanks a lot.

Just an update: I could make Emphatic run by writting this line on Config.sys:
;@EXEC_ONCE /usr/local/bin/emphatic
But I still having a problem. Emphatic only runs when in AC mode. When in DC mode it freezes the player.

Ricardo

Please post your config.ini and a log of the serial output (if any) when the player freezes.

Tony,

2.0 is really nice, and worth the wait. Thanks! I especially liked the track info overlaid on visuals.

It works fine for me in AC mode, but when in car, after I select emphatic from the hijack menu, the screen goes blank. I haven't changed the xml file, and my config.ini looks like this:

[Options]
Name=Yogi

[Network]
Gateway=0.0.0.0
Netmask=255.255.255.0
IPAddress=192.168.1.2
DHCP=0
[sense]
muteaction=0
mute=-1
[power]
off_timeout=5000
[display]
visual_names=1
caching=0
[synchronise]
seq_num=8
[wendy]
flag_amount=0
[custom]
wendy=
[searches]
amount=0
[hush]
hushpercent=20
[volumecap]
enabled=0
[kenwood]
disabled=0
[ramp]
disabled=0
[menu]
quit=0
sort_playlist=1
[tuner]
region=europe
[controls]
stalk_side=none
[aux]
source=
title=
artist=
[VisualFavourites_AM]
count=0
[VisualFavourites_AUX]
count=0
[VisualFavourites_DSP]
count=0
[VisualFavourites_FM]
count=0
[Startup]
ReserveCache=48
[output]
notify=1
[hijack]
;@EXEC /usr/local/bin/emphatic

Thanks,
~Yogi

That's my Congig.sys:

[Startup]
ReserveCache=10
[hush]
hushpercent=20
[display]
visual_names=1
caching=0
[volumecap]
enabled=0
[kenwood]
disabled=0
[ramp]
disabled=0
[menu]
quit=0
sort_playlist=1
[controls]
stalk_side=none
[tuner]
region=us
[Options]
Name=Ricardo Menezes
[User Info]
Email=menezesr@terra.com.br
Phone=55-18-3624-4780
Name=Ricardo Menezes
[sense]
muteaction=0
mute=-1
[power]
off_timeout=60000000
[aux]
source=
title=
artist=
[synchronise]
seq_num=96
[wendy]
flag_amount=0
[custom]
shuffle0=Favorites,skipped_count=3200,RANDOM=10
shuffle=Favorites,skipped_count=3200,RANDOM=10
shuffle=Favorites,skipped_count=3200,RANDOM=10
shuffle=Favorites,skipped_count=3200,RANDOM=10
shuffle=Favorites,skipped_count=3200,RANDOM=10
shuffle=Favorites,skipped_count=3200,RANDOM=10
shuffle=Favorites,skipped_count=3200,RANDOM=10
wendy=
[searches]
amount=0
[VisualFavourites_AM]
count=0
[VisualFavourites_AUX]
count=0
[VisualFavourites_DSP]
count=0
[VisualFavourites_FM]
count=0
[Network]
Gateway=0.0.0.0
Netmask=255.255.255.0
IPAddress=192.168.1.3
DHCP=1
[output]
notify=1
[hijack]
;@EXEC_ONCE /usr/local/bin/emphatic
[ir_translate]
;Shift key (ATT)
AF5067=null.S
; These are needed to ignore the "Func" button sending out a bogus code
AD529B=null
80AD529B=null
;Shift Normal
AF5039.S=20DF0E ;Vol- Search
AF5036.S=20DF01 ;Band ABC
AF5030.S=20DF02 ;Source DEF
AF5032.S=20DF04 ;Up GHI
AF5034.S=20DF05 ;< JKL
AF5035.S=20DF06 ;> MNO
AF5033.S=20DF08 ;Down PQR
AF5037.S=20DF09 ;Disp TUV
AF50F6.S=20DF10 ;Nav WXY
AF5038.S=20DF0D ;Vol+ QZ
;Shift Long
;Long
AF5034.L=2.L ;FF >
AF5035.L=4.L ;RR <
;Normal
AF5038=a ;Vol+ +
AF5039=b ;Vol- -
AF5035=2 ;Right >
AF5034=4 ;Left <
AF5032=0 ;Up Up
AF5033=6 ;Down Down
AF5037=20DF14 ;Info Disp
AF50F6=20DF15 ;Visual Nav.
AF5030=20DF05 ;Genre Source
AF5036=20DF01 ;Art. Band
;AF5067=20DF0D ;Search Att

Nothing happens with the serial output when it freezes in Car mode. It happens like Rearviewmirror" said. The screen goes blank and the player freezes. It was happening with the old version of Emphatic and with the new version too.

Thanks a lot.

Ricardo.

I'm having the same problem in DC mode.
My config....
[Options]
Name=empegcar
[User Info]
Email=
Phone=
Name=
[Network]
Gateway=0.0.0.0
Netmask=255.255.255.0
IPAddress=192.168.0.2
DHCP=0
[sense]
muteaction=0
mute=-1
[power]
off_timeout=2000
[display]
play_count=1
visual_names=1
caching=0
[synchronise]
seq_num=645
[tuner]
region=us
[controls]
stalk_side=none
[hush]
hushpercent=50
[volumecap]
enabled=0
[kenwood]
disabled=0
[ramp]
disabled=0
[menu]
quit=0
sort_playlist=1
[aux]
source=
title=
artist=
[wendy]
flag_amount=0
[custom]
wendy=
[searches]
amount=0
[VisualFavourites_AM]
count=0
[VisualFavourites_AUX]
count=0
[VisualFavourites_DSP]
count=0
[VisualFavourites_FM]
1=Flancedoor
count=1

[output]
notify=1

[Startup]
ReserveCache=10

[hijack]
;@EXEC_ONCE /emphatic
disable_bassboost_FM=1


[ir_translate]
vol+=vol+,vol+ ;vol up 2 presses
vol-=vol-,vol-,vol- ;vol down 3 presses

[shuffle]
deduplicate=1



I had to add the Reservecache and EXEC settings manually as they didn't get set with the install.
I had the earlier version installed(1.1 ?) and installed the newer version in same location.Don't know if that matters.

I need one of you to post a log of what happens on the serial output when you run emphatic in DC mode. First try selecting "Force DC Mode" in the Hijack menu and see if you still can't run emphatic. If emphatic still works in "Force DC Mode" then I need one of you to hook up a laptop or something in your car so I can see the serial output in "real" DC mode (in the car.)

Let me ask it this way, is *anyone* other than me having zero problems running emphatic in the car?

For those who didn't get the settings in your config.ini (other than mcomb with the ext3 problem), I really don't understand why. Admittedly, DOS/Windows have no built-in "ask yes/no" command (that I know of) so I'm using a bit of a hack that involves creating a temporary file and using "del /p" to choose yes or no. But it should work, or at least it does for me. As far as the FTP script itself, I don't see any good reason why it should have failed to update your config.ini files.

Oh, and ReserveCache=64 is a really big number unless you're running other apps. I don't use any ReserveCache at all on my Mk2a, but I threw a small amount in the install script just in case someone's got a really big player database on a Mk2.

in 2000/XP you would use the SET command to get a y/n prompt