Hi there !
not exactly sure if this is a general question or a wishlist thingy, so i crosspost this :)

After investing *several* days to download stuff to the empeg ( HIERARCHICAL PLAYLISTS NEEDED ), now i ask myself, what if the HD Fails ???


I need the feature to backup the whole empeg unit, or at least the complete title structure as it is.
So will this be possible in future releases of emplode ( Backup/restore whole structure ?!?! ) ?
Another thing -> I want to be able to get mp3's back from the empeg, when i am at a friends place ...

The only other way of backing up, would be to get out the HD and use my i386 Linux to do a backup ...
As i don't want to void my warranty or to cheat the empeg guys, please make it possible soon ...

Any opinions appreciated.

Nils

The backing up issue is something for us to think about, certainly..

The "getting tracks off your player at a friends place" issue is exactly why you can't currently retrieve tracks from the player. We would very much like not to become synonymous with music piracy.

The legal issues are becoming more clearly defined as the technology matures and it seems likely we'll be able to relax this restriction in the future.

Of course I'm not suggesting that this applies to you, I'm sure the tracks were free music.

Rob

Hi again !
Of course i know that you, as a company, have to worry about legal issues when adding a new feature/function.
90% of the music on my empeg is a rip of CD's that i own, which should also be perfectly legal, 10% is ... well ... FREE MUSIC, lets put it like that ... :)

But, besides all legal concerns, it is a *must* that i am able to backup my unit somehow, it is not only for all the mp3 files, of course i still got them on DAT or CD'R s, or at least i could rip them again.
NO, it is the hours of work that i invested for arranging them and to put sensible ID3 Tags on them.
I need to backup all this work, and i doubt you will find one customer that does not want this feature.
And by the way, i would love to be able to use my empeg to carry other data ( Pictures, data, whatever ) besides mp3 to other places, using it as an external USB Harddrive ...
If you are unable to do this because of legal concerns, then please give us the tools that we need to develop things on our own ...
This is a must in my eyes, maybe i am the only one ...


But by now, thx for this great thingy, i am quite optimistic that we will overcome all of the empegs technical or legal limitations this or that way ...


Nils

P.S. What about the torn "warranty void if removed" stickers ?! after just plugging in the empeg about 10 times i can foresee that it will not last much longer, it is already damaged ...

> NO, it is the hours of work that i invested for arranging them and to put
> sensible ID3 Tags on them.
> I need to backup all this work, and i doubt you will find one customer that
> does not want this feature.

Well, I'm personally not interested in backing up the empeg. I'm investing
the effort to create the ID3 tags etc on my PC and I then intend to backup
all my ripped CD MP3s to CDR. Since I should get 10 CDs or so per CDR,
that will make it manageable for me.

Anyway if you want to copy stuff to and from your empeg, just get ppp
running and you can ftp, rsh, rsync,... to your hearts content (though
not yet over USB).

Paul

Yup yup, i thought of this, what do you think, when will we see USB-PPP ?? :)
Because serial is slow as hell ...
Interesting would be:
IF i use rz/sz or so, which files would i need to backup except the mp3's themself ??
( Is the database in one single file ?! )
So question to the empeg ppls:
Which files would i need to backup in order to fully restore my empeg HD if shit happens and i get a new hd already running the empeg system ?

Nils

> when will we see USB-PPP ?? :)

5 minutes after John releases the Linux usb driver :) Which is apparently
working, just not very well yet.

> IF i use rz/sz or so, which files would i need to backup except the
> mp3's themself ??

The MP3s are in /drive*/fids/*0 for all *1 of type tune. You would also
want the playlists which are *0 when its *1 is type playlist. However,
it's probably easier to just do this tar cvf /drive0/backup `find /drive*
-size -1000k`, though it will backup unecessary things like /drive0/var/*
which can be recreated from the fids/*1.

Personally, I've made links from all the MP3s to a second directory and
I use rsync to copy all MP3s from my PC that I've generated and don't
yet exist on the empeg or have changed. Then I regenerate all the *1 fids
with a script. I've got a perl script to generate a complete hierarchy
of playlists based on the ID3 tags, but it only works on my PC so far,
as I need a load of extra perl modules on the empeg.

Paul