I'm hoping that I can use jEmplode 56 to accomplish this task, but I'm having trouble...Any comments, or suggestions would be most welcome....

I have 2 Rio Centrals, each with 120GB drives, one destined for work, one for use at home. I'm trying to prevent loading and re-ripping all my CDs a second time. My "main" Central has about 95 GB of tunes, and while I have some specialized playlists, I do have a playlist created for each artist that has all the songs from all of their CDs. So there aren't any orphan tunes, each one is in at least one playlist.

The second Central currently has a mostly empty drive. I have both units hooked up to Ethernet via USB with the adapters. They work fine separately and do proper CDDB lookups.

When I launch jEmplode 56 to attempt a copy between the two, it recognizes both. So I choose one of them, and it downloads the database, etc. Then I use the File pulldown menu, Open other device and choose the second unit. It also opens up fine and now I have two separate windows with a Rio Central featured in each window.

I'd like to copy the entire set of music from the first Central to the second, but I'm at a loss how to do this and keep all the tags and the album hierarchy correct. I've been able to select all the music from the first Central by clicking on "All" in the soup view, then pulling down the "Edit" menu and then choosing "Select All". But when I go over to the second Central window and try to paste, I've been able to get songs to start copying but only with the song titles intact on the second Central. None of the other tag information comes through that way.

I've also tried many other ways of copying all on the main Central, such as clicking on "All Music" and getting all the playlists to show up on the right side. But many times I can't get any tunes to copy over when I attempt to "Paste" on the second Central. One time I did get an "All Music" tree to copy over to #2 in the playlist area, but all it had was the titles of each playlist and no tune in each one....

Does anyone have any suggestions about, first, whether what I'm trying to do is possible, and second, the best way to go about it?

Thanks very much.....Randy

In theory you're supposed to just be able to select any playlist on one central, select "Copy", open the parent playlist on the other central, and hit "Paste". I thought that Mike put that functionality into Jemplode and it was working more or less.

Alternatively, you can just download all the songs onto your PC's hard drive, then put them on the other central directly. It would probably be even faster that way. There's even a procedure to dupe playlists structures after you've done that. But one step at a time...

Or you can put both drives in the same Central (one drive goes in place of the IDE CD-ROM temporarily), and copy the FIDS directories over. That's the fastest. I just don't know all the shell commands to do it, but I'm sure someone here can help with that. Note that you need a USB keyboard to access the shell.

Haven't we discussed this before?

Thanks, Tony....I would love to put the two drives in one Central and copy the tunes that way, but I've tried twice and couldn't get the Central to boot up with two drives installed. I did have a problem with the IDE cable that surfaced later, so maybe the cable was the problem and I should try it again...I have a USB keyboard, so if anyone knows what the shell commands would be, I'd appreciate some help and maybe I'll give that a try...

As far as the copy/paste operation, I've spent 4-5 hours trying to get this to work with no results. I don't think I'm doing it wrong, but ya never know (that's why I posted)...

Another reason I'd like to copy the songs this way is that my original Central with all the tunes won't accept the latest software upgrade (1.10). The second Central took it just fine, and I wanted to get those fix(es) installed (especially the multiple copy mode fix)...

So if I can get this copy operation to work correctly, then the second Central can be my "master" and I can use my hard drive dupe box to clone that hard drive and get two identical units with the same music and upgraded software...

If only I can copy the music....I guess I'll look into the Central --> PC --> Central copy solution. Is there anything in the FAQ about that? I'll take a look...

Randy

Shouldn't need a FAQ, just use the download feature in Jemplode.

Well, I think I have a solution to report on. I wasn't able to get satisfactory results with jEmplode. As I mentioned above, only the song title tags copy over with the song and all of the other fields come in blank. That would be a lot of work to fix up, so that doesn't seem to be the way to go...

I tried downloading songs from jEmplode to my PC hard drive. I was able to build up a CD's worth of songs on the hard drive, but didn't see a real slick and easy way to copy those songs back over to the other Central. It looked like more of a manual process than I wanted to attempt with 90 GB of tunes...

So I had an idea that turned out to be pretty good and worked for this particular application...I got a copy of Ghost 2003 and did some experimenting. I was able to duplicate the entire Central hard drive using the Ghost cloning feature in 90 minutes for 120GB drives. One nice feature of Ghost is that it reports the serial numbers of the drives so you can keep track of which is source and which is the destination drive (I didn't want to copy a blank hard drive over my full one!)...So Ghost helped me duplicate the drive pretty quickly....However, since the drive was a duplicate of the original, it also wouldn't allow me to install the 1.10 software update....I got the same error message as reported in the Central forum previously. Since my goal was to end up with an upgraded hard drive that has both the latest software and all my music, I knew I had to keep at it...

So this morning I had another idea that worked successfully and helped me solve all of my problems. I was able to end up with an updated software version and all of my tunes on the 120GB drive as follows:

1) I started with a blank hard drive in the central
2) I used the original CD to format the drive and install the original software.
3) Then I used the update CD to install 1.10 (it has always worked on a blank drive, but seems to fail on a disk that I've been using for awhile or a drive that has lots of music on it)
4) So now I had a drive that had no music, but did have 1.10.
5) I stuck that drive back in my PC and used Ghost to only copy the large Linux partition contents from the original drive to the new drive. There are 4 partitions, but the other three are quite small. The one to copy is the large partition with all the music. That took 90 minutes.
6) I tested my new "master" drive back in the Central and it works!!!! So now I have all my tunes, playlists, etc. and the new updated software.

I'll test this for awhile and see if it really is working, but for now I think I've solved my problem....

Randy

Yup, the large partition is the one with the music, the smaller ones are the software and the scratch and such. Good work.