Fair enough rant, and it really proves that the firmware in any case needs to be decent.

Browsing a folder structure to me is poor, because it's still not the hierarchal niceness the empeg had. I could have a piece of music in as many places in the hierarchy that I wanted while only one file was actually on disk taking up space, hence the niceness of a database. It also added metadata at the folder levels, allowing me to specify X folder as audiobooks and to exclude them from a mass shuffle, something not possible with just pure MSC And I could really care less what the files look like once they are on the device. So keeping the folder structure to me is a negative of mass storage usage.

A bit of a tangent here, but hey, it's off topic...

My ultimate dream for media storage on the home server was to have some SQL driven database keeping tabs on FLAC files somewhere. In the database would be all the artist, album and so on info, then this database would tie into plugins for Samba that would present the music back out as nice files. At the top level, you could have MP3 128bit, MP3 VBR, OGG, FLAC, and whatever. Inside each would be folders listing albums, and inside there would be the nicely named 1. A Song.file files. If a system accesses a file, the Samba plugin goes to work on real time converting the FLAC to whatever format based on the parent folder picked. You could even create parent level folders specific to a device to then point the syncing software to.