Rio Car Alpha Release 25-Jul-2005 Version 3.00-alpha11 Copyright (c) Digital Networks North America, Inc. 2003, 2004, 2005 * Notes This is a Rio Car Alpha Release. This release may not be stable, and is for Empeg Mark 2 and Rio Car hardware only. Those who value stability over excitement should steer well clear of this version, in favour of the v2.00 release. On the other hand, many people do use these alphas on their main players on a daily basis without significant problems; your mileage may vary. * General This release comprises three different versions of the car-player software: * Standard Edition (car2-*-v3.00-alpha11.upgrade) This is the successor to v3.00-alpha10, and is the one most users should install. * Japanese Edition (car2-*-v3.00JE-alpha11.upgrade) This build contains glyphs for the JIS X0208 subset of Japanese characters, in the larger font only. Because of this, the menus and the "Info: Track" screen have been changed in the Japanese edition to use only the larger font. Due to the increased size of the font data, this edition is recommended for 16Mb (and above) players only. * Receiver Edition (car2-*-v3.00RE-alpha11.upgrade) This build turns your car-player into a Rio Receiver-like home audio player, capable only of playing audio content from a network server, not from its own hard disks. You will need Rio Receiver server software running somewhere on your network. Consult the release notes for alpha 8 Receiver Edition for more details. As always, the Unofficial Empeg BBS at http://empegbbs.com is a good place for discussing this alpha, or the car-player in general, or indeed life in general. * Installation You should install the new emplode before installing this release. If you fail to do so your car-player unit may not function and it will be necessary to apply the upgrade again using the correct version of empegUpgrade or upgclient. This release contains an interim Emplode build, which does not yet have an installer. Install the v2.00 version of Emplode, unzip the new executable and library to another folder, and execute from there. Now proceed with installation of the firmware. Connect your computer to your car-player 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. * What's New Since 3.00-alpha10 - Player Reading the dynamic database has been speeded-up. A bug whereby the player would lose its running-order when Tweak Order failed to find a match, is fixed. Beeps (Menu, Sound->Beeps) now work again. The player no longer marks tracks for attention under its own initiative just because their calculated length is incorrect. The glyphs for characters U+00D8 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH STROKE and U+03CC GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH TONOS in the large font have been corrected. In "Info: Track" and "Info: Now & Next" modes, in addition to the letter "s" to indicate shuffle mode, and "r" for repeat mode, you get a letter "l" while playing lossless (FLAC and WAV) content. A crash on certain MP3 files (those with a Xing header containing no TOC) is fixed. Previous alphas, when they detected a player with a memory upgrade installed, reserved 64K per megabyte to allow for increased system overhead due to the larger memory size. There is anecdotal evidence that this isn't enough, so alpha 11 reserves 128K per megabyte. This reservation is added to any specified in the config.ini file. Symptoms of memory exhaustion range from sluggishness to audio glitching to outright crashes. Key-presses can now be queued-up in the search screens. The feature that allows disabling of the "Plays" counter display in the "Info: Track" mode has been backported from the v2 branch. (In your /empeg/var/config.ini file, add "play_count=0" to the "[display]" section.) The display is disabled in the Japanese Edition due to the changes made in the "Info: Track" screen; to see the play count, use the "Track Details" window (hold down Info on the remote control). Manual tuner scan mode (hold down left or right button) has been fixed. (We'd all forgotten how it was meant to work, so we had to look in the Button Guide on www.riocar.org.) Tuner AF can be turned off properly now. (Hopefully. We haven't been able to test it thoroughly.) The following tuner settings can be tweaked in the config file, in the "[radio]" section: "search_level", defaults to ((60*65535)/100) - min signal strength to stop on when seeking "ta_switch_level", defaults to ((60*65535)/100) - min signal strength to change to if there's a TA "af_switch_level", defaults to ((50*65535)/100) - min signal strength to consider retune for AF * What's New Since 2.10 - Emplode No new release. * What's New Since 3.00-alpha1 - Emptool No new release. * Known Issues Probably doesn't work on Mark 1 players (untested). The giant font used in InfoTex and related visuals is Latin-1 only and does not correctly display accented characters, Greek, or Cyrillic. The "Toilet Floor" visual was unstable in testing and has been temporarily removed for this release. Reportedly, using the search features can cause audio glitching. This has yet to be addressed. Long bursts of fast-forwarding or rewinding can cause a lockup. Searching doesn't work properly for accented characters, Greek, or Cyrillic. Although Emplode 2.10 will correctly transfer ID3 and other tags containing characters above U+00FF, including Greek and Cyrillic, such characters don't appear correctly in Emplode's own UI. Peter Hartley, 2005-Jul-25 peter@empeg.com