Sometimes you need to install a binary on your empeg. In my case, I wanted strace.

It’s been many years since I last connected my empeg player to a Linux PC, and the muscle memory’s gone. Here’s how to make it work with Ubuntu 20.04.

The hard disk in my spare empeg player (“toothgnip”) died at some point. I’m using a 64GiB Transcend 2.5” PATA SSDs in my main empeg player (“crowley”), but they’re getting harder and harder to find, so I opted for a Kingston mSATA disk (240G) and a JMicron-based mSATA to PATA adapter.

In response to this thread on the empeg BBS, I hacked together a couple of small tools for the empeg car player.

The last couple of entries have shown the hex dumps of the individual packets. We’ll step back to a slightly higher-level view now.

The next packet that the empeg sends is the actual response to the OP_STATFID request. It looks like this:

We’ve seen the format of the packet that emplode sends to find out the length of a file on the empeg (OP_STATFID). The empeg seems to always send a progress packet in response. The packet looks like this:

The format of the packets in the empeg’s TCP/IP protocol owe a lot to the fact that the empeg mk1 communicated over a serial link. This means that there’s a certain amount of cruft still in the protocol.

If you’ve ever gone looking for the music and playlists on your empeg, you’ll find them in the /empeg/fids0 and /empeg/fids1 directories.

Over on the empeg BBS, tfabris said:

The sequel to Partitioning an empeg’s Hard Disk Manually.

If you’re attempting to upgrade the hard disk in your empeg, and the disk builder is not working for you (this is often the case with disks larger than 60Gb), then you might want to build your new disk manually.

I’ve been playing around with learning C#. Today, I thought I’d write a C# program to find empegs on the local network.

While I was at empeg, I wrote the original server software for the Rio Receiver. It has, shall we say, certain limitations. Some of them were down to the way marketing wanted it to work, and some of them are squarely my fault.

You can send the empeg player commands using the serial port. This is a list.

Before you start, it’s probably worth running fsck on both the source and destination players. This is to ensure that the disks are in a consistent state. To do this, check the instructions in the FAQ at riocar.org.

Some stripped down utilities for the empeg:

Grab a copy of rsh-client from the debian archive.

A while ago, I published my Lazy Bastard’s Guide to Cloning your empeg. This has worked successfully for me and other people. However, it has one major limitation — it’s an all-or-nothing operation — it clones the entire empeg. If you add a bunch of tracks to one of your empegs, you end up having to copy all of your tracks again.

emplode v2.0 adds the ability to search your music database. It provides two methods of doing this: simple searches (which are hopefully so simple that I won’t explain them here), and advanced searches.

Note that this only applies to v1.x car player software. v2.x uses a different error numbering scheme.