Here's a thought for the backup utility.
Why not just dump the entire raw disk using dd to stream out to the usb port to a listener waiting for the stream?

I'm not sure about check suming or error checking, but it seems to me that this would get everything.

To restore you could just reverse the process.

good idea, but with a couple of hitches. dd will make an image of the entire drive, whether it contains music or not. a backup of a nearly empty 30GB empeg will still be 30GB in size (before compression).

also, it locks you into a particular drive size. if you backup your 12GB empeg, and later want to restore on a nifty new 48GB drive, you'll still be left with a 12GB partition map after the restore.

i think a file-by-file approach is the way to go.

--dan.

Copies of software and audio files for private purposes are legal in Germany, too. You are just not allowed to sell them or make them available to foreigners. Sharing with friends for private purposes is ok, though.

WAIT. We have to differentiate this a little:

1. It is legal to copy audio for private purpose. The media you copy from must be either your property or being lent to you. You can only copy for your purpose, you are not allowed to make copies you intend to give away as a present or that you intend to sell. There are two szenarios that effectively do the same, but one is legal while the other is illegal: You own a CD, make a copy of it and give that copy to a friend as a gift. This is illegal. Now, you lend that CD to your friend, give him an empty CD-R as a gift, he gives you the CD and the CD-R and asks you to copy it for him (note, he doesn't give the CD back to you, he only gives it to you for the sole purpose if making a copy). I don't know the english words for it, but the difference is that while the CD always is (and well be) your property ("Eigentum",i.e. you own it), he still has it ("Besitz", it is part of his possesion) in legal terms. After you made the copy, you give the CD and the (now written to) CD-R to him. He can now give the CD back to you (and thereby end the loan of it). This procedure is legal (though effectively doing the same thing as the easier procedure of just copying the CD and giving it away). Weird, isn't it?


2. Software is a whole different thing. It is legal to make backups (no matter what the product license says), that is you may make any number of copies of a software you own, but you are still limited to use only as many copies of it (at the same time) as you have licenses to do so (you are not limited in the nummber of private audio copies or the use of these). You are never allowed to make a copy of a software you don't own (such as your friend's MS Office), and of course you are not allowed to use one of his backups. The copyright holder of the software may make excempts, as it is done with GPL and other public domain software, or even limited excempts, such as done for shareware. Oh, no law exists that limits your choice of backup media, so you might even be safe if you put your backups on the internet, as long as you make certain that those backups are not used by anyone else.

Just to confuse you all some more.

cu,
sven

proud MkII owner (12GB blue/green/smoked, #080000113)

I was assuming that that you own the CD, because the other scenario (while maybe legal) sounds like a strange situation to me which forcefully tries to get around the law.

At least I'd consider it weird that a friend would borrow my Empeg just to give it back to me to make a backup of its contents. :) All I want is a private copy of its contents (and since I own the contents anyway .... but that's a different story :) )

Till

A couple of minor corrections:

1) Displayserver doesn't require a nonstandard kernel for the backup thingy to work. It'll work with the standard kernel. You do have to install displayserver onto the empeg's hard disk and run it, though.

2) Displayserver does not require a CSV export.

3) I don't know if Displayserver backs up only the song files, or if it backs up the *1 database files, too. If it does, then it really is a full backup utility.

___________
Tony Fabris

I would like to say that, last night, I taxied a 250mb zip file home on the empeg using EmpegTaxi and it did not have any errors.

Maybe it doesn't need a checksum?



___________
Tony Fabris

and providing they don't travel to, say, Florida to give a talk on, say, 'empeg backups: Theory and practice'

ROFL !!!!

I don't know how many people got that reference, but damn, that was funny.

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Tony Fabris

But that's the point -- the backup copy would be made to and kept on the PC. Or am I misunderstanding something here?

Yeah- that the empeg (the source device for the copy) is not a PC. It is classified as a digital music player, not as a PC. By allowing it to copy the files, it would become a non-PC digital music copying device, and as such, would require SCMS implementation to comply with the letter of the AHRA law.

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Tony Fabris

Thanks for being transparant about your plans about the software.

I know that most people will appreciate gestures like this.

Cheers,

Paul.

Paul Haigh, Reg. 4120
(mk1) 6GB, Blue, 00254
(mk2) 12GB, Red, 00357

I don't mean to be nit picky and I hope I don't get flamed but I wanted to raise this.
With my Rio600, I'm pretty sure i can copy a song to it and on a different computer copy the song back down.
Am I missing something here?

With my Rio600, I'm pretty sure i can copy a song to it and on a different computer copy the song back down.

If I understand Rio's position on this, you shouldn't be able to do it with the software Rio provides. Maybe with third-party software, but not "out of the box". That would be the same position the Empeg is in right now.

I don't own a Rio600, so I can't check. Why don't you double-check that one and get back to us?

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Tony Fabris

...you can get away with doing the same thing on your PC is because PC's are specifically protected by the AHRA.


A couple of questions related to the above.
Could this be why some companies are billing their units as AutoPC's?

Dose the AHRA contain a definition of what constitutes a PC?

I can't think of a single characteristic of the empeg that could be used to declassify it as a pc. Not without that same characteristic being found in machines that are undeniably PC's. No kbd, no display, think about rack mount servers. No IP address, HA! Size, my Handspring is smaller, faster and has more storage than the original IBM PC. Actually I think the empeg would outperform that old IBM too.

Enough beating around the penguin. Why doesn't that PC exclusion in the AHRA apply the the Empeg?

--Glenn

That is correct. With the out of the box software it is a one-way trip for music. On the Rio800, which has a microphone, you are enabled to off load recorded files, but that is all.

I believe there are some third party applications for pulling files off, but none that come from Rio.

Best regards,
Tim

It has to do with the primary purpose for which the product is sold. This will relate to the out-of-the-box functionality, placement within stores, marketing approach and so forth. Like most legislation, the implementation is somewhat open to interpretation.

Rob

To answer your AHRA questions, here is the full text, as well as one interpretation of it.

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Tony Fabris

It's important to point out that empeg have taken certain measures that make it difficult for you extract files from the empeg car player. There's another U.S. law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that criminalizes the creation of "circumvention" devices. How this law applies to the situation of "backing up" files on an empeg is largely open to dispute because there really isn't sufficient case law (i.e., judicial verdicts that interpret the DMCA). The EU has a similar law on the books that's, so I've heard, even more draconian than the US law (and don't ask me how the EU parliamentary system interoperates with national laws of EU countries).

In short, given the current twisted technical and legal quagmire that is sometimes called "digital rights managment", it's quite understandable why empeg ships their product as they do. Until things settle out, including the lawsuit where I'm one of the plaintiffs, it would be inadvisable for a third-party to build software to "circumvent" the mechanisms built into an empeg.

Then tell me why isnt this any issue with my Archos MP3 player ??

/It has to do with the primary purpose for which the product is sold. This will relate to the out-of-the-box functionality, placement within stores, marketing approach and so forth. Like most legislation, the implementation is somewhat open to interpretation. /

Then tell me why isnt this any issue with my Archos MP3 player ??

I've never heard of that product. Perhaps it's not an issue because that one is small enough to fly under the RIAA-dar?

___________
Tony Fabris

Call me a wimp and a weenie... but I don't want to deal with the hassles involved with a non-standard kernal.

You don't need a non-standard kernel for displayserver, just the developer image (so you can install it). You only need the kernel patch if you want to control the empeg remotely through displayserver (and some other IR related applications), but displayserver works fine without it.

I'm not sure, but I think displayserver does not save the database file. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.

Also, displayserver requires some hoop jumping -- export to a csv file, use that as an "index" for retrieving the song files, something like that. I just want to hook up my USB cable, click an icon on my desktop, and walk away and leave it running overnight and come back the next morning and know that my data files and song files are safe.

I'm not talking about downloading the songs one by one, I'm talking about displayserver's separate backup mechanism (which you'll see if you read my previous message carefully). There's a 'System backup' link on displayserver's homepage that will land you one giant tar file with the entire contents of the music partitions, including all songs and database files.

"Then tell me why isnt this any issue with my Archos MP3 player ??

I've never heard of that product. Perhaps it's not an issue because that one is small enough to fly under the RIAA-dar?"

The Archos is one of the most popular MP3 portable players, together with SSI's Neo Jukebox.
It uses a notebook harddrive (like creative's Nomad), but it's not limited to 6gig (I know, the Nomad isn't either, with some tweaking, but the Archos doesn't get painfully slow when it's HD gets upgraded)

More info on it here :http://www.archos.com/uk/default.html
and here : http://www2.funmp3players.com/

If I was in the market for a portable MP3 player, this would probably be the one I would buy.

The Archos is one of the most popular MP3 portable players, together with SSI's Neo Jukebox

Neither of them are close to being the most popular MP3 portable player (in terms of sales volume). If you're talking specifically about hard disk portables, then you could perhaps make that statement since there are only a few products on the market right now. Last I heard, Creative were in the lead by a large margin.

Rob