Sorry to harp on this, but when you rip your CDs to WAV files, where do you put the ID3 information??

In the filename.

What set of tools do you use to do your ripping and all that?

I rip my CDs using either cdparanoia on Linux, or EAC on Win2k. If I'm using EAC, I configure it to output WAV files, named according to: {source} - {tracknr} - {artist} - {title}.wav

If I'm using cdparanoia, I rename the files myself first.

The reason that the artist goes _after_ the source and tracknr is because I have a lot of compilation CDs. This scheme means that everything is grouped by source (album) and then sorted by track number.

I then copy the files onto the nearest Linux box and use LAME to encode them. Once they're encoded, I use a shell script to extract the ID3 information from the filename and tag the files (using the id3tag utility from id3lib).

I then organise the files into Artist\Album or Compilations or Books or Soundtracks directories. The layout matches that used on my empeg.

Then it's relatively simple to drag-and-drop the root directory to emplode to keep them synchronised.

any hope for FLAC support on the car player?

Well, the command line tools run fine on the HSX-109 (John R tried it the other day).

We'd need to look at licensing issues (libflac is LGPL, so that shouldn't be a problem). Also, we're kinda in feature-freeze for 2.0, so something this big would have to wait until after 2.0-final, probably. It also needs to be prioritised and scheduled.