Topic: flac encoder and rio karma support??? (Read 5081 times)

japdanz · « **on:** December 10, 2003, 11:31:28 am »

Hello all...

I have been playing with the MC9 30daytrial version and have been really impressed...it is quite the player!

A few questions....
1) Will MC9 (or 10...) support the Rio Karma mp3 player?? I noticed it has support for some other rio products, but not the Karma.

2) Will a FLAC encoder/decoder be made for MC9?

thats all for now....still playing around alot with it....

cheers!

japdanz

japdanz · « **Reply #1 on:** December 16, 2003, 06:18:34 am »

can anyone help me with these questions???

please??

japdanz

JimH · « **Reply #2 on:** December 16, 2003, 06:49:49 am »

Not sure about the Karma. If you install their drivers, does it show up as a drive? If so, it should be visible under the Handhelds section of the tree.

No FLAC encoder exists for MC, but you can use a stand-alone encoder.

I believe people have been able to get the FLAC decoder for Winamp to work by putting it in the right directory.

SteveG · « **Reply #3 on:** December 16, 2003, 08:54:58 am »

In regards to the Karma, we do not have one here to test, but I have tested many of the new Rio players and they all have been WMDM compatible (a Windows standard). We provide an option for support for any WMDM devices, so it will probably work, but hopefully someone who has one can confirm this.

Steve

gcaparulo · « **Reply #4 on:** December 23, 2003, 10:11:04 am »

I think the Karma is WMDM compatible - you can use WMP9 to tranfer files to it. However, it does not show up as a portable drive under the windows OS, so therefore I don't think it's Media Center compatible.

Any word on a driver for the Karma?? Also, what about Smartphones with Media Cards? They're also WMDM compatible, but MC9 doesn't pick them up.

Thanks and great product (you guys 'get it').

SteveG · « **Reply #5 on:** December 23, 2003, 10:44:32 am »

gcaparulo,

If you have a Karma, can you go to Tools->Plugins->Portable Drives->Configure and check the box to "Enable WMDM support" and then MC should be able to work with your Karma. Can you try this and let us know?

Thanks.

Steve

PS I don't know about Smartphones and Media Cards, sorry.

gcaparulo · « **Reply #6 on:** December 23, 2003, 06:14:53 pm »

Steve - Tried it, and MC9 now recognizes both the karma and my MPx200 smart phone and lists tracks on both. However, it seems like MC9 has trouble trying to drill down (expand the device). Haven't played with it much, but will do so in a few days. Will report back then.

Graham

SteveG · « **Reply #7 on:** December 24, 2003, 09:41:23 am »

Graham,

If the tree is not expanding correctly, you most likely need some files from Microsoft which get installed when you install WMP9. The next build of MC 10 will include these files so you will not need to go get them. I think all should work well then.

Steve

gcaparulo · « **Reply #8 on:** December 29, 2003, 10:16:17 am »

Steve - I do have WMP9 installed. Also, tried it with 10.24 BETA. Same issue, says Server Busy - switch to application or Retry. 'Switch to' does nothing - looks like a memory leak. Hope that helps.
Graham

SteveG · « **Reply #9 on:** December 29, 2003, 11:56:13 am »

Graham,

Do you see that 'server busy' message only when you go to expand the tree? Does WMP9 show the Karma OK?

Steve

gcaparulo · « **Reply #10 on:** December 29, 2003, 04:31:59 pm »

Steve - Yes and Yes. I can expand Atrist, Track, Genre, etc... in WMP9.
Thanks

Charlemagne 8 · « **Reply #11 on:** December 29, 2003, 08:43:59 pm »

A superior FLAC decoder/encoder and converter to APE, MP3, OGG, WAV (even 24bit, 96k, 6 channel) or MPC is dBPowerAMP Music Converter. The link escapes me but you can do a search. Version 10 is the latest.

Best of all, it and the plugins needed to convert to your desired formats are all freeware. You install only the plugins you need.

CVIII

SteveG · « **Reply #12 on:** December 30, 2003, 09:42:10 am »

Graham,

Can you ever get beyond that message and see the tree expand?

Steve

SteveG · « **Reply #13 on:** December 30, 2003, 03:40:11 pm »

Graham,

Until I get a Karma, I am guessing, but I made some changes in the next build of MC 10 (10.0.26) which I hope will cause that error to go away.

Steve

gcaparulo · « **Reply #14 on:** December 30, 2003, 04:49:00 pm »

Thanks Steve - Drop me a note when it's published and I'll give it a shot.

To answer your previous question - I haven't waited around to see, gave it about 10 minutes, and nothing - just high processor/memory utilization for MC9 and MC10.24.

Graham

gcaparulo · « **Reply #15 on:** January 02, 2004, 11:57:58 am »

Steve - 10.26 dosn't seem to help the issue. Still can't expand the tree. Also noticed that Genre, Album, etc.. is not displayed - just the track name. Seems like MC isn't reading the full ID tag of the file - might be part of the problem - I'd imagine MC needs this information to generate an expanded tree of the device. Happy new year.

Graham

landrover · « **Reply #16 on:** January 04, 2004, 07:35:34 pm »

The best player/encoder that I've found - that is STABLE and includes multiple CODECs (including FLAC) is JET AUDIO. And it's free. The only thing it misses is MP3 encoding (it's included in the full version). I think MC has promise but....it's been a nightmare in crashes and compatability with my FLAC library.

LisaRCT · « **Reply #17 on:** January 05, 2004, 09:32:26 am »

Thanks for the FLAC info . . . . I do use dbPowerAmp Converter but would love to see DIRECT flac support built into MC or an MC plugin to work with FLAC.
Many of the achives for concert 'tape' traders (legal, band authorized tapes ONLY) are moving into FLAC as the mainstay format and away from SHN and others.

zevele10 · « **Reply #18 on:** January 05, 2004, 10:18:53 am »

There is a hard drive mp3 player playing FLAC.

OK , a MP3 player playing FLAC is not an MP3 player , it is a player.

The same here , i start to have quite a lot of FLAC files , never keept my SHN , thinking it was a kind of 'Zipper for music" with not a good sound.
But i would like VERY MUCH to be able to play FLAC in MC.

In my opinion , MC NEEDS to play ALL formats. Matt the father ,or not ,of APE.

I do not say convert , but play , this is a very big deficiency in MC

Riping right now my 16 cds Rolling Stones remastered box set with MC

groovedaddy · « **Reply #19 on:** January 21, 2004, 06:44:37 am »

Quote

Until I get a Karma, I am guessing, but I made some changes in the next build of MC 10 (10.0.26) which I hope will cause that error to go away.

I've been keeping my eye on whether more Karma support is going to materialize for the MC9. Simply put, the upload software accompanying the Karma just doesn't cut it. And I've tried all the suggestions posted so far to fair success. It does show the Karma as a handheld and can access it (though I have hit the troublesome 'server busy' message on more than one occasion). But most recently, I've left MC9 to uploading tunes only to come back a couple of hours later expecting a completed job and it hung at song 25 of 2000.

I have some good tunes and some not so good tunes (mostly my wife's fall into this latter category) that I'd rather not put onto my precious and MC9 fits this need to a tee.

So, here it is again...any shot at getting a plug-in supporting the Karma for MC9? I'm not terribly interested in upgrading to 10 quite yet and I would like to have a tighter upload process. I've spent many an hour trying to devise a devious scheme to use both MC9 and the Karma upload software together, but my feeble mind craps out far too often.

Thanks for the thoughts.

Cheers,
GDaddy

urlwolf · « **Reply #20 on:** January 21, 2004, 12:52:31 pm »

I'm in the same situation. There is something that the JRiver should know about the karma that can make supporting it an incredible move:

(1) The community is incredibly big and commited to the player. see http://www.riovolution.com/
(2) The program that comes with it is not that great
(3) Other companies such as redChair released a program to talk to the karma, but the genrealized opinion is that it sucks
(4) They offer open source libraries to talk to the karma, so that should make easier to develop a plugin for MC

So MC would be the first real alternative in the market for karma owners.
Right now, MC "sees" the karma, but this is far away from being actually useable. The current upload speed is pretty bad, at least worse that the original program from Rio. Plus, to be useful we need to 'see' the contents in the karma, and being able to easily synch it.

Hope that helps,
-urlWolf

groovedaddy · « **Reply #21 on:** January 23, 2004, 06:44:11 am »

Urlwolf,

You make some great points. The one area of the community that impresses me is that the lead engineers are receptive and active participants (similar to what we have here in this forum which is why I really dig both Karma and MC).

One other point that I left out is that MC doesn't recognize an already uploaded song so if you're not careful you could have duplicate tunes on the Karma. This is troublesome since I constantly make adjustments to my tags (like genre). This is the one perk of the Karma software.

As a further incentive to creating a really tight plug-in, I promise to flood the Rio community with passionate unpaid advertisements to the MC's wonderful perks as an alternative to the Karma Music Manager. Imagine the flood of adoring Karma owners beating down your door...

Cheers,
GDaddy

SteveG · « **Reply #22 on:** January 23, 2004, 11:01:29 am »

In regards to the Karma, if you have not, please try testing it with the latest build of MC 10 (10.0.43) with WMDM support enabled. Let me know how it is going. It would be ideal if this worked well so we wouldn't have to write a separate plugin, but if not, we will add one when we can.

Thanks,

Steve

urlwolf · « **Reply #23 on:** January 24, 2004, 08:44:26 pm »

Steve,
I installed beta43, went to plugins manager > handheld, activated WMDM, and plugged the karma, but MC10 doesn't see it. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. When I click handheld player in the action window t just shows a popup saying "no handheld available".

Can you doubleck the steps?

CHeers,
urlWolf

gcaparulo · « **Reply #24 on:** January 25, 2004, 10:36:03 am »

Steve - Looks like you guys have made some progress w/ 10.43. I can now expand the Karma on the left hand pane. Can see all content, artist, album, genre. However, the right hand pane still doesn't list the track details (only show's file type). Response speed was OK, but not ideal. Also, tried to transfer some VBR WMA's, MC said something about can't transfer due to lack of rights?? The files are not protected - no license.

Getting there...

Graham

SteveG · « **Reply #25 on:** January 26, 2004, 04:02:16 pm »

Graham,

We will have a fix for the 'lack of rights' error soon (next build?). Are you saying that you can view the appropriate Artist information in the tree, but if you click on the root of the Karma, you do not see this information in the right view?

Steve

gcaparulo · « **Reply #26 on:** January 26, 2004, 04:30:11 pm »

Steve - That is correct. I don't see any information in the right hand pane other than track name and file type, regardless of what is selected (root, artist, genre, album) in the left pane. Again, the left hand pane does expand the Karma tree into Album, Artist, Genre. Looks like MC is now reading MP3 tag info and able to sort on it, but doesn't display in right and pane.

Thanks - Graham

urlwolf · « **Reply #27 on:** January 27, 2004, 12:51:16 am »

Steve,

I tried again and MC "sees" the karma now (10.0.43). I', installing 0.48. I got to transfer 99 out of 150 songs, and then MC died with a runtime error "virtual something", I couldn't read it completely.

Cheers,
urlWolf

urlwolf · « **Reply #28 on:** January 27, 2004, 01:02:54 am »

Just a quick note:
The karma player has to be turned off when the usb cable is plugged for MC10 to see it. otherwise, it won't be recongized (10.0.48).

Cheers,
-urlWolf

urlwolf · « **Reply #29 on:** January 27, 2004, 01:22:38 am »

I noticed that once the karma is recognized in the left hand pane, the tags are not. That is, the right pane (main window) shows the name, but not the album, genre, etc. All the other tags are ignored. I know that the tags are there because the karma uses them to organize music, and my collection is carefully tagged.

Other thing that I noticed is that it is terribly slow on my machine. everytime one clicks on something (e.g., an artist name), it takes 2-3 seconds to display the list of albums in the left pane. That might be because it goes out to the external HD to retrieve them. It would be faster to load the entire database to the PC and do all the searches locally, without having to send a request to the karma. I guess that is how the native software reaches its speed (several orders of magnitude faster).

In conclusion, you are getting there, but still not usable at all.

Cheers

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Author Topic: flac encoder and rio karma support??? (Read 5081 times)

LisaRCT

zevele10