Sorry, I was not precise. NTFS 5.0 always had symlinks ("junctions" in MS world), so Windows 2K/XP have it, NT does not, since it uses NTFS 4.0. I think there was some SP that brought the NTFS version up to 5, but I am not sure. I think it was release after I moved to 2000, so I do not remeber well.

What do you mean by maintaining the hyerarchy in regular win apps like "winamp" ?
What I was thinking was to create a tree structure on the hdd that mirrors that of the USer Playlists on the empeg, and when emplode detects that a file is present in more than one playlist, it may

1) put it in the first playlist and make a .lnk in all the others
or
2) copy it in a special folder and create a link in all the other playlists.

Now, wait, as Rob said (sorry, I just got what you menat now ) it could also copy all the files in one single folder and then create in another folder playlists as M3u files, but that could make it harder to make changes on the hdd and then sync them on the empeg, which is a feature that may hopefully be implemented later... So maybe the simple tree folder structure and .lnk is the way to go... What do you think?

One more thing. Does WInamp "play" .lnk? Let me go and check what happens if I drag an mp3 shortcut on it...
Ok, now this is great. It plays it! also, I tried with a shortcut to an mp3 that was on a network drive, so no problem with that either!