Rio Car Alpha Release 10-Jul-2004
Version 3.00-alpha8, Receiver Edition

Copyright (c) Digital Networks North America, Inc. 2003, 2004


* Notes

This is the first alpha release of the Receiver Edition firmware for the
Rio Car (but it's called alpha 8, because it matches alpha 8 of the
standard edition). As a preview release, this firmware may not be stable.

The Receiver Edition firmware turns your Empeg or Rio car-player into a
Rio Receiver: that is, a thin-client audio player which plays files which
are kept on a server computer and accessed via Ethernet. The Receiver
Edition can NOT play files from your car-player's hard disks: the disk is
used only to load the player software, and then is spun down.

This firmware is NO USE to people who use their car-player in an actual
car -- where there's no Ethernet and no server -- and is made available
only for those who've got a spare car-player and would like to turn it
into a home audio player.

If you wish to use your car-player in a car, you should avoid the Receiver
Edition and use the stable 2.x standard edition, or, for the adventurous,
an alpha release of the 3.x standard edition.


* General

If you are not an alpha tester, please hold back on reporting bugs until
a public Beta is released - unless it is something really critical!

As always, the Unofficial Empeg BBS at http://empegbbs.com is a good
place for discussing this alpha, or the Receiver Edition in general, or
indeed the car-player in general.


* Installation

You will need a music server on a PC on your home network. The original
Rio music-server as shipped with the Rio Receiver, "Rio Audio Receiver
Manager" (for Windows only), can be downloaded from www.rioaudio.com --

 http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/support/rio/product.asp?prodID=99&locSup=USA

-- but frankly it's a bit clunky and many people will be better off
with one of the third-party ones. The FAQ in the Rio Receiver section of
the Empeg BBS, http://empegbbs.com, lists some.

Now proceed with installation of the firmware.

Connect your computer to your empeg car using the supplied serial cable.
Switch off your player at the wall or unplug the IEC cable from the brick
power supply.

The upgrade can be installed by serial only. Run the Upgrade Wizard and
either enter or browse for the upgrade file. Click Next and select the
serial port that your unit is connected to. Click Next again.

When instructed to do so by the upgrade program re-apply power to your
player by switching it on at the wall or connecting the IEC cable and brick
power supply. If you have an all-in-one power supply then switch it on at
the wall if possible or plug into the wall. The upgrade should then be
applied. If it fails, try again.


* Uninstallation

To turn a Receiver Edition car-player back into a standard one usable
in a car, apply a standard edition firmware upgrade to it (either v2
or v3). The Receiver Edition will not have touched the music files or
the database, so everything will be back to normal.


* Receiver Edition: What You Get

You get almost all the features of the standard edition car-player v3.00
alpha 8 firmware (consult those release notes too), including:

  - MP3, WMA, Vorbis, and Flac playback
  - Gapless playback
  - Crossfade and pitchbend
  - Insert, Enqueue, Append into the running-order
  - Find matching artist/Hate artist etc
  - Extended Latin, Greek and Cyrillic in both font sizes
  - A full set of visuals and info modes

The few things you don't get are those related to dynamic data, as a
Rio Receiver's view of the server's database is regrettably read-only:

  - No biased shuffles (as play counts can't be stored)
  - No wendy filters (the server database doesn't have this field)
  - Emplode/Jemplode/Emptool can't connect to the player (just add the
    files on your server instead)
  - No bookmarks

As is the usual way with Rio Receivers, you get automatically-generated
menus for artist, album, and genre -- sometimes called "soup menus".
Actual playlists are in their own menu, one level deeper than in the
standard edition firmware. Pressing down-down-down no longer does what
you think it does.

Some server software portrays folders on the server as playlists; other
software only displays M3U and similar playlist files. Consult the
documentation for your chosen server software.

Because the Receiver Edition loads its firmware from disk, you don't
need to set up a "software server" as well as a "music server" (but
many server packages include both anyway).

In summary, what you get is the best of both worlds:

   - Like a Rio Receiver but with a much nicer screen and better software
   - Like a car-player but with unlimited capacity and no disk noise


* Known Issues

The Receiver functionality depends on Ethernet, of course, so won't work
on Mark 1 players.

The networking settings -- DHCP or static IP address -- are taken from
your existing setup. Make sure these are correct before applying the
upgrade, as there's currently no way of changing these settings on a
Receiver Edition player (without manually editing config.ini, or
changing back to the standard edition).

The search windows don't work (but you get "soup menus" which do work).

Long-press of "down" for the Insert/Append/Enqueue menu doesn't work in
the autogenerated "soup" menus, only in the Playlists menu.

Large playlist menus -- e.g. Artists -- take a while to come up. It's no
slower than a real Rio Receiver, but it's still slower than car-player
owners will be used to.

As a Unicode-enabled application, the Receiver Edition expects tag data
from the music server to be in the UTF-8 encoding. All existing server
software -- even Rio's -- hands the client tag data in the Latin-1
encoding, as that's what all previous clients have expected. This means
that accented characters, Greek, and Cyrillic in tags will display
incorrectly until server authors update their software. Server software
can tell what to do in order to support both types of client correctly,
because the Receiver Edition adds a new "_utf8=1" tag to all its queries.

Although the Receiver Edition supports Vorbis and Flac, most server
software, including Rio's, does not; similarly for nested playlists.

It's likely that some third-party car-player software will become very
confused by Receiver Edition operation. Sadly there was no time to
involve the third-party developers in the release process, so please
don't be too hard on them, as they didn't see this coming.


Peter Hartley 2004-Jul-10
pdhartley@rioaudio.com