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rio car dot org FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)



Category: Main -> Software and player operation questions
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·  Why do the visuals disappear every time I put it in the car? 
·  I just got my new player and I have many gigs of MP3s to install. Is there anything I need to keep in mind? 
·  Why can't I add more than one song at a time? 
·  What does the flashing LED on the faceplate mean? 
·  Do I have to put the player into standby mode before I pull the plug? 
·  Can I copy MP3 files back onto my PC from the player? 
·  Is there anything I should keep in mind when I grab files from the player? 
·  Can I back up the player's playlists and music files? 
·  What is the best way to organize and listen to my music? 
·  How can I keep my PC and my car player in perfect synch? 
·  How do I upgrade the firmware on the player, and will it erase my music files? 
·  Is it bad for the player if it gets too hot or too cold? 
·  Do I have to use the remote, or can I do everything from the front panel? 
·  What do all the buttons do? 
·  What's this I hear about a 'Stun/Kill' button on the remote control? 
·  What is a parametric EQ, and what does the 'Q' parameter do? 
·  Where can I download a list of EQ presets? 
·  How do I know what the hard disk is doing? 
·  Does disk space get wasted if I make a second copy of a song in a different playlist? 
·  What about editing/renaming multiple copies of the same song? 
·  How can I be sure that I've deleted all copies of a given song? 
·  How do I make albums play in the correct order? 
·  How do the Tweak Order functions work? 
·  How does the 'Ignore as Child' option work? 
·  What in the world is a 'Wendy Filter'? 
·  How do the Bookmarks work? 
·  Can I delete songs from the player's front panel? 
·  How can I tell which tracks I have marked with the 'Mark' key? 
·  What search terms can I use in the Advanced Search box in Emplode? 
·  What is this 'Soup View' I hear other people talking about? 
·  What do the little letters mean on the Info:Track screen? 
·  When I move the player between the car and the house, what does it do differently? 
·  Are there any 'Easter Eggs' in the player? 
·  What do the various symbols mean on the 'Aux Info' screen? 
·  Can I reset the number of plays and other statistics? 
·  Why does it play clusters of artists or albums? 
·  How do I cancel out of a synch? 
·  How do I skip to the next album or the next playlist? 

·  What is a FID?
 (Entry last updated on March 24th, 2004)

FID stands for File IDentifier. FIDs are the actual files on the empeg's hard disk which contain the music, database entries, and playlists.

In other words, when you upload "Rush-Tom Sawyer.mp3" from your PC to the empeg, it does not get named "Rush-Tom Sawyer.mp3" on the empeg's hard disk. It becomes a FID instead. The FIDs are all stored in the directories "/drive0/fids" and "/drive1/fids" on the empeg's hard disks.

Fids have two parts, the index file and the actual data file. The index file is the one ending in the number "1" and the actual data is the file ending in the number "0". For instance, on my player, the actual MP3 file of Tom Sawyer is "/drive0/fids/bf90" and the song's index/tag data is stored in "/drive0/fids/bf91".

The files that end in "1" are just ascii data containing the song or playlist information. For instance, on my player, /drive0/fids/bf91 looks like this:

duration=273946
bitrate=fs256
genre=Progressive Rock
file_id=01
type=tune
length=8767903
codec=mp3
artist=Rush
offset=1627
tracknr=1
ctime=1053562286
year=1981
source=Moving Pictures
rid=70d3fc79d7338bd1c897ebeae124d987
samplerate=44100
title=Tom Sawyer


Playlists are also FIDs. The difference is that their data file (the 0 file), instead of being an MP3, is a list of the sub-fids contained in that parent FID.

The way the empeg handles them is: Each time you synch with emplode, it sends a special command to the player software to rebuild the database. The player software then mounts the hard disks read-write, scans through every single FID, and concatenates all the index data into a database and saves it to the hard disk. Then it sets the hard disks read-only again and reboots. From then on, each time the player is booted up, this database is what gets loaded into the player's memory.

Having the song data indexed into this carefully organized database (instead of leaving everything as loose files named willy-nilly) allows the player to do all of the amazing things we take for granted, and do them instantly. If the player didn't use this structure, the software would do everything dog-slow, because it would have to scan the whole hard disk every time we asked it to look up an artist, or open the playlist menu, or even switched to the next track.


·  What happens during a synch, and what do the stage numbers mean? 
·  Can I use a USB-to-serial converter dongle with the player? 
·  What are some other good tricks for using the player? 


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