Well,

I never thought I'd have filled up my 20G empeg, but I did today. It's taken 7 months and a lot of effort - but I now have my entire collection of CD's on one portable-electronic-compressed-jukebox-audio-visual-player. Larger drives please Rob, or maybe I should have narrower music tastes, nah - more space required....


Regards,


_________________________________________
John, (S/No 0114, 20G).

It's taken 7 months and a lot of effort

Wow, must have been hard work

Out of curiosity and a desire for statistics:
How many albums?
How many tracks?
What ripper did you use?
What settings?
Any plans for extra drives yet?

Henno
# 00120

I also have a 20Gig unit and thought it would be plenty but I'm almost full now!
Perhaps it was too many http://Napster.com downloads ;)


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I was showing off my (at that time) 4gb empeg, and the guy said, "could it hold my whole collection?", and I said, "it holds all of my favorites. How big is your collection?", and he said "I have about 1500 CDs".

Whoa...

Let's do a little math...

Grabbing average album from my collection, I see it's about 57 minutes long (many weigh in at 50 minutes or less, while others go all the way out to 70+ minutes). That album is 52.2 megabytes when recorded at 128kbps fixed bitrate.

So, 1500 x 52.2 is... 78,300 megabytes, which is 76.46 gigabytes.

It's a good thing they keep inventing bigger laptop hard drives, isn't it?

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

I hear you - I've got less then 2gb free on my 20gb empeg right now...
-mark



...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

Hi,

In reply to:

---

I also have a 20Gig unit and thought it would be plenty but I'm almost full now!
Perhaps it was too many http://Napster.com downloads ;)

---

Hey, we're only just getting ADSL over here in the UK! All the music on my empeg is ripped from my own CD's. I guess Napster is tempting, but I still like to own the originals.

Regards,

_________________________________________
John, (S/No 0114, 20G).

Hi Henno,

Out of curiosity and a desire for statistics:

How many albums?

Hmm, not sure. I've 565 playlist on the empeg and I don't tend to cross-link tracks too often.

How many tracks?
3933 (I've 5200 on my Harddrive (25G)), I have some tracks that are 74 mins long!

What ripper did you use?
MusicMatch & AudioCatalyst, Catalyst has gone out of favour, it's started adding a splurge of noise at the beginning of some tracks! I guess it needs a setting tweak? I like it's ability to normalise, but have discovered it's not the peak level that makes one track louder than another - it's the dynamics of the recording. So, normalisation isn't the main thing. I've been recomended one called Neo??? or something, it's been optimised for Plextor drives... I'll keep you posted.

Musicmatch has some nice gizzmo features and has free upgrades.

What settings?
I just use it!

Any plans for extra drives yet?
I guess so now, the warranty runs out in a few months - I could add then or wait until the MKII hits the streets and ensure it's got at least 36G?

Regards,

_________________________________________
John, (S/No 0114, 20G).

Hi Tony,

I guess not too many people have collections quite as massive? I thought mine was quite humble until I got around to ripping them! A labour of love...

Regards,


_________________________________________
John, (S/No 0114, 20G).

It's a good thing they keep inventing bigger laptop hard drives, isn't it?
Yep, but what if the Toni's of this world keep buying the small ones . . . . ?

Henno
# 00120

I now have my entire collection of CD's on one portable-electronic-compressed-jukebox-audio-visual-player

With all that hard ripping and tagging work behind you, John, plenty of time for your Sony remote project now ??

Henno
# 00120

Hi Henno,

With all that hard ripping and tagging work behind you, John, plenty of time for your Sony remote project now

Laying out a PCB as I type, getting to grips with Protel!! I'm making progress though, should have something to get made up in a couple of days. I'm aiming at an engineering version first to satisfy the few that want one, then a surface mount smaller version secondly (if demand is high enough).

Regards,


_________________________________________
John, (S/No 0114, 20G).

I frequently will download Napster mp3s and if I like them, will buy the CDs and re-rip them myself. Some of the Napster files are tuncated, or otherwise defective. Some of the Napster files are legal releases by artists that origionally distributed via mp3.com or their own websites, so the copyright issues are not always as bad as it seems.


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I should probably post this in the technical forum, but I'll start it here as my mind's fresh.

I've been thinking of the various problems related to people running out of space, and the other issues like connecting stuff via the serial port, the new 10baseT connector, the radio input. It seems to me we need one unified input/output system to solve all these problems.

My concept is to have a port on the empeg, that's dockable for in-car use but can also be accessed when not docked, that acts as a bus system for communications to and from the empeg. The USB is out - not only is it not dockable but the master/slave system makes things very difficult to do both (as empeg keep telling us). A few other things, like Firewire, have been suggested but are also a bit expensive to add on, both in terms of cost and board space.

The idea I'm toying with is to use ThingNet (i.e. whatever seems to be the best peered device network hardware) and hook everything else off that. For instance, the radio tuner would be a ThingNet device, as would the serial port, and any other things (such as a GPS system, external display, external storage systems, etc. etc.) that you'd like to attach to the empeg in the future.

The reason this thread is here is that I see a great use for this ThingNet in providing extra storage space. Have a dockable 'external storage unit' with a latch to bolt the unit firmly into its case (in, say, the dash, or the boot, or wherever). Bring it in with the empeg (connected by a ThingNet cable separate from the dock-to-empeg-bay connector) to update it, and then put it back again. No more worries that you might fill up your 100GB unit; just buy another 50GB ESU.

And now the laughter starts.

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

I don't think there's much point discussing hardware modifications to the player at this stage. The design is now fixed and we have no plans to produce another version of the player (beyond Mk.2) for some time. The idea behind the Mark 2 is that it has everything fixed to make production easy, and all the hardware features are in place to support a lot of software expansion.

Almost all of the devices that people want to plug into their empeg whilst in-car are relatively low bandwidth. Given that we have a fairly fast docked serial port (including flow control on the Mark 2) I would suggest that the best way to support multiple devices would be to split that out into a number of slower serial ports.

This would require some hardware in the dash with a processor fast enough to run a few software UARTS (a fast PIC should do the job) and a device driver on the player to present a number of virtual ports.

Even allowing for protocol overhead it should be possible to run, say, eight ports up to 9600. That would cover GPS, stalk control, cellular data, CD changer and a bunch of other stuff as well. It should be possible to implement in such a way that individual projects can use it transparantly.

What do you think?

Rob

(I'm not suggesting this as a project for empeg, by the way, we're a bit busy right now!)

This is pretty much what Patrick was working towards at one point (read his description in the Projects section) but he has no doubt had enough on his plate with the Mk2 work in the past 6 months.

Problem is you want cheap (for serial ports) and high bandwidth/low cpu utilisation on the empeg end (for disk drives).

Really, the mk2's ethernet is ideal for this. We could quite easily part-populate an empeg mk2 board, fitting less ram and no sound circuitry and then use this as a disk slave to the main empeg :)

Hugo

This would be very interesting - I know it's off the track of your current development, but is there *any* likelihood of this?

Maybe. At the very least we might play with software when the mk2 is out and allow very very rich people to put twin 50gb empegs together for 100Gb of seamless music ;)

Hugo

Hugo, this is a wonderful idea (using the MKII ethernet to add additional storage). However, does the MKII have an ethernet port exposed out the back of the sled? I thought the ethernet was only for in-home docking.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

It doesn't dock but it wouldn't be hard to plug the cable in manually. There will be a corresponding gap in the sled for it.

Rob

It's probably been raised before, but I take it you've all seen the MP3 stuff that DelphiAuto produce?

http://www.delphiauto.com/index.cfm?location=538#a

I've never seen their products, but keep coming across ads - they're always in the US edition of Wired.

J.

Really, the mk2's ethernet is ideal for this.

Hmm, what about a way to do MK2 <-> Laptop for music like this as well? Just load a small program on the laptop to talk to the MK2 and pass on music in a preset location on the laptop. Then adding temporarry extra storage would be nice, and it would make for an easy way of doing extras with the MK2 as a laptop would still have a serial port for GPS and PCMCIA for wireless internet connections. Hmmmm.

Thinking about it more, the ethernet on the MK2 will open up so many possibilities. Wireless LAN syncing in the garage thanks to an wireless <-> wired bridge. With Airports at $200, it might just work.

My empeg site is:http://24.236.3.131/empeg/

> With Airports at $200, it might just work

We'll tell you if it works later today, as soon as our Airport bridges are delivered.

Rob

I still intend to do this at some point, but as you guessed, I've been up to my eyeballs in the mkII design work. It's nearly finished, though, so fairly soon I should be able to do something along these lines.

I've thought of a few more things to add, as well, such as a 3-axis magnetic compass. Could be fun.

Patrick

Opinions expressed in this email may contain up to 42% water by weight, and are mine. All mine.