Two simple (perhaps even naive) scripts I whipped up to help recover the music from my dead (bad IDE cable) player. (Now a live working player with only a single drive.) I rsync'd the fids using a laptop to read the drives since I couldn't boot the player to pull the music off with emplode.

fid2mp3.sh - shell script that makes symlinks from a single mp3 directory into fid directory, e.g. "mp3/Artist - Title.mp3" => fids/a8e0

fid2mp3.pl - much cooler perl script that builds hierarchy of directories to represent playlists from the root playlist, makes hard links (look like regular files but don't take up extra disk space) back to the fids. forum wouldn't let me attach as ".pl" so I renamed it to ".pl.txt".

My parsing/understanding of fids is likely to be simplistic but this appears to be working for me. If you know of something I'm doing wrong or something that the script won't handle I'd enjoy fixing it.

Since I was not able to find anything to do this (but had seen some others asking how to do it) I thought it might be useful to the community.

P.S. Obviously these are intended for use under UNIX/Linux... specifically I doubt hard links work on Win32.