Quote:
Since I would have the machine apart anyway, there would be no extra trauma for it with regards to the connectors. Also, I planned to use a USB to 2.5 inch drive converter to actually attach it to the PC for filling.
[...]
How long should 40 gigs take to fill up with the USB lead?

You don't get the full USB1 bandwidth, or anything like, talking to the car-player directly: you should expect ~400Kbytes/s, so you're looking at 100,000 seconds, or about 28h. I've just done exactly what you describe (USB-to-IDE adapter, mp3tofid(*), mount on Linux) to re-fill my player after sticking new disks in it: I got ~10Mbytes/s, and I'd've got more than that except I stupidly made the "mp3tofid" directory tree on a different PC than the music files were on, so they all went over 100Mbit Ethernet.

It's not necessarily a beginner's task, though; the steps are:
  • Follow Roger's partitioning instructions using PC Linux and your USB-to-IDE adapter (your drive will appear as "sda" or "sdb" or similar instead of "hdc").
  • Follow Roger's formatting instructions.
  • Use Pim's mp3tofid program, which creates a link-farm on your PC that mirrors the desired directory layout on the car-player.
  • Use rsync (or just cp -L) to copy them to the filesystem on /dev/sda4
  • Install drives in player and run the normal upgrader to populate the root filesystem.
  • Then either use Emplode/Jemplode/Emptool for subsequent addition of music, or set up the whole rsync-over-Ethernet thing described on Pim's README.

I had 180Gbytes of mixed FLAC and MP3, so I was looking at a 6h vs 125h transfer.

Peter

(*) In fact a little program I knocked up a while ago, which is better about ASX playlists and about tracks which exist both as FLAC and MP3 -- but the moral equivalent of mp3tofid.