1) Some sort of archival capability. I am investing enough time into marking up my tracks, setting up my playlists, and selecting my music that it is well worth it to me to shell out $100 to buy a hard drive that I can back my empeg up onto. I am getting very concerned about losing my data due to a failure of either the hard disk or the software. If you are concerned about enabling piracy, then I can live with an archive solution that only restores onto Empeg.

2) One-button shuffle toggle. Nothing new here, but I very frequently go back and forth between enabling and disabling shuffle. I would really like to be able to shortcut this toggle with some button combination on the remote. Unfortunately, this will of course require setting aside some portion of screen real estate for showing the current setting of the toggle.

3) I hope that Empeg Limited has a wildly successful 2000, and is able to keep doing the kind of software projects that you enjoy and excel at. I am very excited about your success!

>>1) Some sort of archival capability. I am investing enough time into marking up my tracks, setting up my playlists, and selecting my music that it is well worth it to me to shell out $100 to buy a hard drive that I can back my empeg up onto. I am getting very concerned about losing my data due to a failure of either the hard disk or the software. If you are concerned about enabling piracy, then I can live with an archive solution that only restores onto Empeg.<<

It's not a complete solution, but one thing you might consider is using a CD-R to archive your MP3 tracks after you've downloaded them to the empeg. You can archive about 10 hours of MP3 music onto a 59 cent disk, and in the event of a disaster it would at least save you the trouble of locating and re-converting your original music. I guess you could also archive your emplode database the same way, but since I am #8741 on the waiting list and still don't have an empeg I am not real clear about how that works and what data is in the empeg and what is on the PC.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

technically you COULD sz the entire fids directory from drive0 and/or drive1 to a HDD, although it would take a considerable time to do it at 115kbs...
-mark

...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

Jeez, poor free-lunch-boy. I didn't know you didn't already have an Empeg.

Here's how the Empeg and Emplode work as far as archiving:

1) The empeg has to get its .MP3 files from somewhere. They have to already be stored on your hard disk before you upload them. In my case, I have a 4gb Empeg, and I have also dedicated a separate 4gb drive on my computer for storing only MP3s. That's my archive.

If you have less hard disk space on your PC than on your Empeg, you could theoretically upload the stuff in batches, deleting it from your computer after each upload, then ripping new MP3s to the hard disk and uploading those. But if you delete them from your computer's hard disk, you won't have backups if your Empeg's drive goes south. Adding an archive function to the Empeg would not change this, of course. That's not what the original poster was talking about. He was referring to...

2) The playlists are not stored on your computer. The playlists only exist on the Empeg's hard drive. The Emplode software is basically just a terminal front-end. all it does is upload files and manage the playlists stored on the Empeg. The person who started this thread was lamenting this fact. He has spent a lot of time getting his playlists ready, and is worried that he'll lose that data someday. He would like to see a way for Emplode to back up the playlists on the computer. That's what he's talking about.

Personally, I don't need to have my playlists archived. If my Empeg's hard disk dies, I'd simply re-upload my files, then spend an evening re-creating the playlists. My songs are already organized on my computer's hard disk in the same heirarchy as the empeg's playlists are (artist/album). My re-organization would be a purely mechanical process of dragging and dropping the songs into playlists in a specific order. The only work I'd lose is the choices I made when selecting my custom "Low Key" and "High Energy" playlists.

I'm guessing that the person who started this thread either: a) doesn't have his MP3's organized well on his hard disk and is counting on his playlists in the Empeg to organize them, or b) has put a lot of thought into making many custom playlists that are more complicated than the ones most folks would do. Either way, it's a valid concern.

Or if you want to void the warranty....

Take the disk out and stick it into a PC running Linux and then you can just copy the files over.
(if you have an adapter for putting a 2.5" disk into a normal desktop PC).

Adapter? We don' need no stinking adapter!
Just leave the chassis open like a REAL man!


_~= Dearing =~_
"WAY too happy about having #99."

But its a little card to connect a standard IDE cable and power lead to the 2.5" drive.
Thats why you need the adapter :-)

Oh, I see. I was thinking the drives used a standard IDE interface.
How much are those adapters?

_~= Dearing =~_
"WAY too happy about having #99."

they sell them for less then $10 here..
-mark

...proud to have one of the first Mark I units