Alright, I have a firewire laptop hard drive transfer drive thing pictured below.

http://s86978102.onlinehome.us/firewire.jpg

How it works is you plug the laptop drive into the ide part and then hook up firewire cable on the other end.

Is there anyway this could be modded into the empeg ide cable so that if the empeg is off and you plug firewire cable into this adapter the drive will be picked up by windows or whatever. There is no power cable for it, it gets its power through the firewire cable.

Cause i figure if you since the ide cables are just wires you could join the ide cable from the empeg and the ide connector of the fireware adapter together, and as long as they aren't both powered at the same time it should work.

I think the Empeg would have to be on when uploading mp3s. Its not simply a case of shoving tunes onto a drive - the Empeg has to sort them out. (very technical!)

Even if it did work, I see no clear advantage from this setup. Or am I missing something? Do you just want a way to upload music without the Epeg being switched on? Not possible I don't think. Or are you thinking more of a file-taxi use?

It would work under Linux, but Windows has no support for the filesystem used on the empeg. (Actually, there are some third-party tools, but they aren't very robust and may not work at all with removable media.)

(Actually, as Philip points out, there's more to it than just uploading the files, so even under Linux it would require a bunch of other stuff to happen. But it'd be feasible.)

Oh, i figured you just uploaded files.
Was just wondering cause firewire would be a ton of a lot faster.

Yeah, both the 10BaseT and USB1 connections provided are pretty slow, but there's not much we can do to fix it. The only thing I can think of would be to use mp3tofid process except replace the rsync with a copy (the drive being locally attached to the computer via whatever method), but it would still require an operating system that understood the empeg's ext2 file system, something that doesn't really exist anywhere except Linux.