I was hoping for a good suggestion or two to handle this situation...

I bought my first Empeg, upgraded the drives, and and have been in the process of copying my collection of MP3's from my Central to it (10,000 songs).

I've been using jEmplode 60 to Copy from the Central and then Paste to the Empeg. It's been tedious to do, but I am about 75% done (I've been working on it about 3 weeks now). Without jEmplode, I'm not sure how I'd have done the copy...

One thing I've noticed is that after the transfer takes place, the song "title" field on the Empeg has an .mp3 extension. On the Central, this file extension wasn't there (i.e. Let It Be on the Central becomes Let It Be.mp3 on the Empeg). I've been going in manually and removing the file extension on the Empeg, but that is getting even more tedious.

Is there some sort of global command I can use to strip these song titles on their extensions? Or something I can when Copying / Pasting to eliminate this step? Or any other suggestions to use?

Thanks, I'd appreciate it....Randy

Well, I came up with a solution to this problem...From CNET.com, I downloaded a program called AutoHotKey that you can use to program keyboard macros.

Attached is a simple macro I wrote that will strip off the last 4 characters (.mp3) from the titles of each of the songs organized by artist.

First, you select a playlist on the left side of jEmplode. Then on the right side of the pane, you click on the first song and note how many songs are in this particular playlist (shown at the bottom of the jEmplode window.

Then you press the Windows hot key (and hold) and then press Z and release to start the macro. It will ask you how many times to repeat (the number of songs in the playlist). Press Enter twice and the macro will begin. You'll have to edit this macro with your own player title and IP address (it's built into the Window bar title of jEmplode and is referenced by the macro).

Just be careful, if you get out of sync somehow, the macro will start deleting characters and you may have to repair your titles....

I'm almost done with repairing my 10,000 song collection, so it's a pretty worthwhile program...I hope this helps others who may have similar needs...

Randy

I'd always meant to write a Python or Perl module for the empeg protocol. That fictional product would have helped here.

Someone else just recently emailed me about this problem as well ... The problem is that the Central doesn't actualyl fill out the ID3 tags on the file, it just sets them in the central's database. The way jEmplode copies is that it just opens a stream onto the file and imports it just like it would off of your local filesystem. But the tags aren't actually in there, so it falls back to just using the filename as the title. I believe you'll find that you lost all of your tags in the conversion. I've been meaning to come up with a workaround to this where I can float the tags along with the stream ...

OK, if you want to be a gineau pig, then go grab jEmplode 61 and try a copy. Let me know if the tags come across. Can you send me the console output too?

I posted here last night, but for some reason it didn't show up this morning...

Anyways, I am the one who emailed you, Mike...The jEmplode 61 software fixes all the issues with copying tags over from the Central to the Empeg!!!! Even the rid which is stored in the Comment field, it's all there...I've been copying by Artist, and was all the way up to "S" before 61 came out, but my copying last night and this morning is perfect...I'll have to fix up a bit of the tags from my previous copying efforts, but that's not a problem....

This is great news, and the new version of jEmplode will make my life a whole bunch easier in my Empeg setup...

Thanks a bunch for your jEmplode efforts!

PS: I fired up Hyperterminal this morning to watch during the copy process. I've had a few unexplained lockups during my copying sessions that would require a reboot of the Central and the Empeg, but could never really pin down what the cause was.

I am getting some error messages on the HyperTerm window that are copied below. These messages show up at the end of the song copy during the "Update [Artist]" section just before the next song copy starts...It seems to be working out to one error message with every 2-4 songs copied...The copy process seems to be working, however, it's just that I experience a lockup on the process every so often...Any ideas? Thanks, Randy

kftpd: ksock_rw(response) failed, rc=0

I'm so excited!!!

I think I discovered the source of the error message that I mentioned in my message above....

I had previously installed Windows XP SP2 on my PC, and was just thinking this afternoon about the new built-in firewall that came with it. I hadn't had any other trouble with it, but thought I'd experiment with disabling it and see what happened...

The error I mentioned above disappeared, so instead of getting one every song or two, they are now gone!!!! And my current transfer is rumbling right along...

Sometimes it's the simple things that make for a very happy day.....

Randy

Anyone else had issues with SP2? I just finished installing it a few mintues ago..