Hi,

My Mk2 has two 20 GB drives from the days of yore, which I am contemplating upgrading to create more space. The upgrade seems simple enough.

As I read it, once partitioned and formated etc., I can simply copy the music files and tags from one old disk to another new disk using any Linux copy mechanism, and the database can be easily rebuilt - so logically, as long as the files are correctly named, with the right data tags, it doesn't matter how they got on to a correctly formatted disk?

My motivation to upgrade the drives is to switch from MP3 to FLAC, mainly because I'm ripping all my CDs to FLAC for use within the home, and I can keep a single consistent central database of music files. However, I am dreading the time it's going to take to load all this data via USB or Ethernet on to the player (200GB at 10 Mbps HDX - and reading estimates from Roger's site of 1GB per hour makes this prospect more than 8 days on constant network traffic), so I was wondering if I could "cheat" and go directly over IDE from my server's disks to one of the previously partitioned, formated and FW loaded disks for the player, and then install the disk in the player.

It seems to me that the only tricky parts are going to be renaming the music file and creating the associated file tags. But once solved, it should be simple?? Has anyone tried this? Has anyone written/extracted the scripts to do this? Actually a better first question would be, are all my assumptions correct, and thus is it possible?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Alan

Yes. It's tricky getting all the bits right, though. If you're only going to do it once, it'll take longer to figure out how to do it and implement the details than it would be just to upload the files with Emplode.

I think you should be able to use mp3tofid to do this. It's intended to use rsync over a network, but I don't see any immediate reason why you couldn't do it between directories and eschew the network part.

Thanks for the comments.

Tony, I agree, but half the fun will be in solving the problem. This will hopefully be a one time event so it may end up remaining unsolved.

Bitt, thanks, the release notes say it's only for MP3, not any Vorbis file type, but I'll take a look.

Thanks

Alan

Oh, good point about mp3-only. However, FLAC is not Vorbis. FLAC is Ogg now.

I don't want to second-guess you or anything, but running FLAC on the empeg isn't ideal. It'll keep your hard drive spun up a lot. If I were you, I'd also transcode the FLACs to mp3 (or Vorbis, if you like) for use on the empeg (and other portable devices).

Bitt, no second guessing involved, good points on the impact on the disks, though the throughput would still be very low compared to typical disk performance. As for Ogg and Vorbis I always mix them up. Peter, thanks that additional comment on native FLAC v Ogg.

My goal of using FLAC was laziness, I want FLAC for the house for quality, and it made sense to keep one store of files that I can then also sync to the car. I know the quality lift would be ostensibly lost due to background noise (I have a Subaru, not a Rolls), so going to MP3 probably makes considerably more sense, and the additional process step of transcoding is not going to be too great. The MP3toFID SW may make that the obvious choice in the end.

I will give this a go and let you know whether it works over IDE - this won't be soon though!

Thanks for all the input, if anyone has additional ideas (like transcoding FLAC to MP3 on the fly - though that's probably an easy enough script), I'd be interested in hearing.

Thanks

Alan

I have the same setup as Roger, but instead of the 'cool' Ruby script, I have a very messy Perl script. I really do think this is the optimum way of dealing with a mixture of FLAC and MP3.

I have a 'core' directory where all the main music goes. It can be in FLAC or MP3. Anything that can handle FLAC (XBMC, future Squeezebox etc) can read this one. My script scans through the main directory and if it finds a FLAC file will transcode it to its new lossy directory. If it finds an MP3, it just symlinks it. This new lossy directory is only MP3s and is read by Emplode, mt-daapd, and Ampache.

Been doing that for quite a few years now and still very happy with the way it works.

(EDIT) Actually if you want my Perl script just give me a shout and I'll email it to you. Be warned it is probably extremely badly written and it does rely on having filenames just right as that is how it tags the MP3s.

Roger wrote:

Quote:
I rip all of my music to FLAC, and then I've got a Ruby script that scans for new/updated FLAC files and then transcodes them to MP3, copying the tags.

Sein wrote:

Quote:
I have the same setup as Roger, but instead of the 'cool' Ruby script, I have a very messy Perl script.

It'a amazing how we all reinvent the same wheel. I couldn't find anything in any language that would transcode flac to mp3 AND copy the tags, so I wrote a python script to do that.

Any else did it in yet another language?

Pim

Sorry, can't add to the language collection - did mine in python, too.