with my unit in repairing, i can't retrieve mp3s normally through empeg, i'm looking a way to do it through fids and database connecting the HD to a portable pc, i've searched in FAQs and in BBS for "fids", "database" "retrieving" etc but found nothing about that (in bbs there are really too posts about fids, database etc ). Is it possible ? there are posts about that ?. thank you very much.

Ummm, it won't be very simple. Empeg disk is 'Linux disk' (meaning that partitions are ext2, understood by Linux, but not Windows). If you connect it to Linux machine, youwill see several small and one large partition. The large one has lots of files, all having a hex number as a name. Those ending in '0' are mp3's, those with '1' contain plain ASCII metadata ('properties', like author etc). Playlists are similarly represented; they simplycontain a list od members. Database is also somewhere there, but it is in propriatery format and it is unlikely you will be able to do anything with it.

Others will correct me and expand on this, but I am going to bed now. It is 5 AM here

To expand on this:

The folder drive0/fids contains all the MP3 files. You can simply copy all files ending in "0" and you have retrieved your MP3s.

If you want those files ORGANIZED, then you would have to have properly tagged the files before sending them to the player in the first place, a tip I keep repeating to everyone over and over again. If you did that, then you simply need to use a tool like MP3 Tag Studio to organize the files into a tree structure and you're all set.

If you didn't properly tag the files before sending them to the player, then you have no easy way of knowing which files are which without either examining the *1 files or listening to the songs.

thanks for the repies, only the 40% of mp3s in the HD were encoded by me and properly tagged so the "rude" fids retrieving doesn't seems useful for me (it's a 60gb hd with 40mb free). if there isn't nothing like it yet, i'll start coding a parser (in python i think or bash scripting) to read the *1 ascii file and give the right name to the *0 file. i'm not a skilled programmer but i'll also try to code something to search and play a *0 file from the informations of the *1 ones (and do a database of it ?) . please let me know if there is something like this just developed or in developement, i've not found nothing about it.
cheers
Patrizio.

I have a perl script that I threw together a while ago that will create a tree of symlinks in artist/album/song format which point to the data fids, extracting the info not from the mp3 tags but from the index fids. This in conjuction with wget or rsync or whatever will give you a mirror of your empeg on a unix machine. It could be adapted for windows use I suppose.

I will attach it in case anyone wants it, but I don't have time to clean it up or document it, so it's probably the case that if you couldn't write it yourself anyway it's not going to be very useful. It probably has bugs in it.

You could also try something like Musicbrainz to straighten out your tags. I find it's good for most all mainstream stuff. It might do 85% of the work for you and then you could use Mp3 Tag Studio 3 to rename the files based on tags. Both are free (Tag Studio is ad-supported unless you pay, but it's not one of these ifested installers a'la Kazaa). HTH.

-Zeke