emulate empeg to sync with local disk on PC

I couldn't find any threads on this so I thought I'd throw this out there...

I'm about to receive an 80GB laptop drive for the empeg and would like to sync all of my mp3's to it quickly. We know that the 10BaseT ethernet on the empeg is not too quick for loads in the 10's of GB so I'd like to find a faster solution.

My idea is to connect the laptop drive to my PC (with an adapter) have Jemplode connect to an empeg emulator that thinks that that particular drive is the empeg and then sync locally.

It should This should speed things up a bit for those who have large loads to deal with. FSCK should be a bit faster too. Has this been done? any ideas?

My idea is to connect the laptop drive to my PC (with an adapter) have Jemplode connect to an empeg emulator that thinks that that particular drive is the empeg and then sync locally.

You don't need Jemplode, you just need mp3tofid. Get it to create one of its magic symlink farms, then copy the whole lot onto your new drive with "cp -L" (which dereferences symlinks).

This only works if you're using Linux on your PC, of course, but then so would any other solution involving direct attachment of the drive -- the Empeg's ext2 filesystems can't be read or written from Windows.

Peter

Remember that you still must properly build the drive using the methods outlined in the Drive Upgrade Guide. The partition scheme has to be built properly by the builder image and the player software installer before you can hand-copy the files onto it.

Also note, if this is an upgrade of an existing player, you do not need to use MP3toFID, you can just copy the existing fids directory from the old hard disk to the new hard disk. There are instructions on how to do it in the Drive Upgrade Guide.

Thanks! That does make it a lot simpler. now I just need to find the manual for mp3tofid (I'll search the faq

Also, when I eventually start using ogg and/flac, will mp3tofid work with those too?

http://www.macroscoop.nl/~pim/empeg/mp3tofid/
As the readme says, mp3 only.

--Nathan

I tried this and had little success. I ran mp3tofid on my directory of mp3s (where tracks are arranged in directories of album then directories of artists).

When I ran cp -L, it would not find the files that were linked - it said no such file or directory for each one. Note I have no spaces in my directory/filenames since I believe that spaces are evil!.

I re-ran mp3tofid (cleaning out the previous results) with the -n option and this time it copied (cp -L) all of the files over to the new drive.

When I put the drive in the empeg and loaded JEmplode, it saw all of the songs, but the tags were all wrong with respect to the Artist (i.e I'd click on the Rush playlist and would see a bunch of James Ingrahm songs and other artists with their sub-dirs underneath).

It looked nothing like my original directory structure that I have of MP3s. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with my mp3 store being on an ext3 drive, and the resulting fid files being copied to the ext2 empeg drive. And would it be due to my usage of the -n option for mp3tofid?

What am I doing wrong?

Brent

Did you force a database rebuild after putting the hand-FIDed disk into the player?

No I did not - thanks!