Currently, I have a 200GB drive that has all of my mp3s on there. I realized that I very rarely access this drive except to put mp3s on there that we just recently added to my empeg. Simply put, my PC based mp3 collection only serves as a backup for my empeg. The problem is, the collection on my empeg is so neatly organized while my PC based collection tries, but can not keep up with the many tracks I have in multiple playlists etc. I'm nearly at 140GB of music, so the thought of putting this music back on the player, even if I had it all, is still a nightmare. I've literally spent years organizing the empeg and fine tuning the track information.

I'm really tempted to use the FTP meathod of backup, where I would copy the FIDs from drive0 and drive1 to my PC because this preserves the database information. However, I have a few questions:

1) Is there any way to update the id3 tags of the mp3s on the player, BEFORE copying them off of the player (I'm aware that Jemplode will update the ID3 after downloading, but this keeps the ID3s on the empeg still out of date). My collection is mostly tagged correctly, but this would still be nice to have emplode or Jemplode do an "ID3 Update" to the mp3s on the player.

and 2) Is there anyway to automate this process so an FTP client would only copy FIDS to my PC that were newer or altered? (ie, when told to copy, it would only do what is needed to update?)

Or, 3) Am I just going about this all wrong?

All opinions welcome, Thanks guys .

JEmplode ?

Using rsync, a certain amount of Python, and a copy of the id3lib tools, you should be able to do exactly what you want.

Mark, do you mean that this might be something already built into HiJack or that it might be a possible feature in the future?

Thanks Roger.. that sounds like it might be a bit beyond my current knowledge, but I'll do some searches on them and see what I can pick up.

I said JEmplode, not Hijack. Perhaps what you want to do (download all tunes and retag them) is simply the same as what JEmplode already offers in the "download" feature. Try it and see. There's an option in the JEmplode options menu to "retag" files as they are downloaded, too.

-ml

Oh, I'm smart . I knew you were talking about Jemplode (and my original post mentioned Jemplode too) but the second I started reply to a post by "mlord" my fingertips thought "HiJack". Conditioned response I guess!

There's just not much documentation on the newer features in Jemplode, I'll check out the site.

In reply to:

---

documentation

---

LOL

There's nothing in jEmplode that will rewrite tags on the player itself, but as far as only downloading changes, I think jEmplode will at least skip duplicate filenames on download (that is, if you download a file, then try to download it again, it will skip the download). SO that might help a little there ... It's not very clever though -- it's only by filename.

ms

Is there anyway I could dump the mp3s to the PC in such a way that I could restore a player with playlists preserved?

You can just use riobackup from rmml.dev.java.net (works on the Karma and the Empeg) to backup your playlists ... It keys off of RID (the unique ID based on the music's content), so you can just download your music and reupload it whenever, and as long as your haven't modified the file (like reripping it or something that would modify the music data), then riobackup will be able to restore your playlists.

Tony can probably give you more details since he probably uses it more than I do (or he did, anyway)

Is there anyway I could dump the mp3s to the PC in such a way that I could restore a player with playlists preserved?

Yes, as Mike said, you could use riorid.jar and riobackup.jar to calculate RIDs and backup/restore the playlists separately from the tunes. Thanks to Mike, this has the advantage of working cross-platform, meaning you can back up the playlists from the empeg and restore them to the Karma or the Central. I've done both, and it works.

But if a simple file-by-file preservation of the empeg's contents is what you're looking for, then simply FTP'ing the entire contents of the FIDs folders on both drives is all you really need to do. (Remember, playlists are FIDs too). This is even outlined in the FAQ here.