While waiting for this Saturday to arrive (empeg installation day), I have been tinkering with how to do my playlists. I have 51 CDs full of MP3s (not all will fit on my 18Gb EMPEG) and their structure is Artist\Album\files.mp3.

I think what I will do is go through all the CDs, pick my favorite albums and then whittle them down to fit into 18GB.

I will then use Dr. Tag to update all the tags to v2 with all possible information filled in (most of it is done already except maybe year, genre, and track number).

I will then make a playlist for each Artist and drag the Album folders into them.

I will then make playlists for the genres and the decades. Now, I have a question. Let us say my MP3s take up 17.5GB. How much space does a playlist take up? I am assuming once all the albums are in the playlist and I copy them to the appropriate decade and genre playlists, that only a pointer to the mp3 is made and not an actual file copy, right?

I figure this way I can listen to a certain band, genre, or decade, or even mix them up (shuffle).

Any suggestions/hints/tips would be appreciated.

I am assuming once all the albums are in the playlist and I copy them to the appropriate decade and genre playlists, that only a pointer to the mp3 is made and not an actual file copy, right?

Yes, this is correct. The MP3 files only exist once. Each playlist that contains them has a pointer to the MP3 file. There is no original playlist as such - everything is a hard link (to use Unix parlance).

You don't strictly need to organise the tracks into genre, etc., since the search feature can pick out tracks by title, artist, genre or year.



Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

You don't strictly need to organise the tracks into genre, etc., since the search feature can pick out tracks by title, artist, genre or year.
If I enter 197 for year, will it find all the songs from 1970 - 1979?

No, you'll still have to generate your "Decade" playlists by hand. There's work afoot in emplode v1.1 to make this easier. We don't, however, have an ETA for v1.1.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

I don't recommend making Genre or Decade playlists. Those can be searched upon (although Decade probably won't happen until 1.1, you can do a single year pretty easily from the remote).

My layout is a bunch of artist/album playlists, and then some "mood/special" playlists at the root. I put hyphens around the names of the special playlists so they show up first in the menu, like this:

- Low Key -
- Tony's Favorites -
- Demo -
- Filks -
- LAN Party -
- Test Audio -
Aimee Mann
Billy Joel
Blues Traveler
(Etc. for all the artists.)

This works really well and allows me to access both my "mood" playlists and my artists fairly fast. The important thing is to keep your tree uncomplicated. I don't go more than two levels deep (artist/album) and all the "special" playlists are one level at the root.

This also makes it fairly simple to rebuild my playlists if my disk gets fried.

___________
Tony Fabris

My layout is a bunch of artist/album playlists, and then some "mood/special" playlists at the root
Tony, thanks for the ideas. I will probably still make a few Genre and decade lists and put a few songs in them. Then when Emplode/EMPEG 1.1 comes out (funny how EMPEG always says no ETA when they mention - do they think everyone will bug them for the date if they do not mention that? ) I hope I can get rid of them and then use the regular search...That way if there is a genre that I want to listen to at the moment I can do it without a playlist.