Has anybody tried this? Would it be possible to take the HD out of an empeg and mount it on a computer, either inside a firewire box or directly with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter kit?

Mybe this is too far off...

Armin

Mounting it to a computer with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter is no problem, as long as you have an operating system that understands the Linux filesystem (ext2fs).
IIRC, there are some tools to read ext2fs from various Windows versions, but can't seem to find any info right now...

/Michael

More details: what are you cooking up? Just want to check and make sure you're not barking up the wrong tree and trying to invent something that won't work.

Well, right now I'm just dreaming things up... Don't have the empeg in my hands yet, although Fedex says it's in my State... it can only be a matter of hours... Oh, excitment!

ok, I calmed down now.

Really, I may not have the patience to shovel 10GB of music through the Ethernet (or worse: USB). But I guess there are two questions:
a) can I mount the filesystem on MacOSX (BSD) or Linux?
b) if I can get to the filesystem, does that help? Can I put mp3 files there or do they go into a proprietary database?

This might be more interesting for the folks with 60GB players. Six times more interesting, to be exact.

Armin

Definately mountable on Linux, dunno about OS X.

But it doesn't really help... As the song is uploaded it's name is set to something like a010, ie a hex number and another file, a011, is created containing the tags that was read from the file. Any tag editing done in emplode then only alters stuff in this file, not the ID3 tags as they exist in the a010 file. A file whos name ends with 0 is a tune file and a file ending with 1 is a "tag" file.

From these (*1) files the database is then built.

Hmmm... you could copy the files on and then create a script to rename them according to standard and then pick out the ID3 tags and create the corresponding *1 files. They would all be in one large pile only visible in the Soup views...

I wouldn't consider it worth the effort... I'd just push a couple of Gigs on each night, starting with the most intersting and current stuff...

/Michael

Right, that's what I was afraid you were going to say.

Don't bother. The files are not stored as arbitrary MP3 files that you could just copy as a group from your PC.

In order for the player to work, it must use its database and its emplode software to load the music. If you just copy the files without using Emplode, then the files won't appear on the player and you won't be able to play them.

The amount of hassle required to build all the necessary database information from an arbitrary set of files would easily exceed the time it takes to simply use USB or Ethernet as it was intended, to transfer 10 gigs of files.

My only tips for transferring that many files are:

- Use version 1.03 of the software to do it. Don't use the beta for huge transfers yet, it's not totally stable.

- Do the transfers in small groups, say, a gig or less at a time. That way, if the process crashes, then you won't have as much backpedaling to do. Note that the 1.03 software is very stable and should be able to transfer 10 gigs at once provided that there's nothing wrong with your system and you don't knock the power plug out of the back of the player. I just recommend doing it in small chunks "just in case".

- Ethernet is a tad faster than USB, so use that if you can.

Ok, I'll skip this one. Thanks for all the info!

Hmmm, what can I think of next? A WiFi interface for the car to network the player as soon as it enters the garage...

just kidding 8-)


Armin

actually some folk already have wireless ethernet running in the car so it ain't that far out. Do a search on this bbs for wireless and see what pops up

What is the effective range for the 802.11b wireless? I saw a regular ethernet plug to wireless adapter at the store the other day. It's somewhat pricey $100. Plus I'd have to get a box on the inside...decision, decisions.

Calvin