I heard that this was going to be added a long time ago, but now can't find it in 2.11. Is there a way to have Emplode automatically sync the playlist to mimic the folder structure on my computer? For instance, I have a Rock, Rap, Mainstream, etc. folders and those are the playlists in Empeg. It would save a lot of time!

B

Umm, just drag and drop the top level folder(s) onto the player..?

I think that one has been in there for a while..

Rob

Would it be possible to create a shortcut within explorer to another MP3 file in another explorer folder (playlist), and have emplode synhcronise this link ?

I know this can be done in emplode alone, but I just wondered if there was a way of backling up such a structure within windows explorer.

Don't understand your question? There's an option in emplode 2.0 to follow Windows shortcuts and/or M3U playlists. Note this caveat, though.

For creating folder structures, you just do this.

But what if I have added say 15 new songs to a folder that has 300 songs. If I drag and drop the entire folder over again, won't it create duplicate playlists?

What I really wanted, was a way to hit a sync button (for those familiar with DreamWeaver), have emplode see which songs have dates later then the last sync up and add only those songs.

I've been doing the drag and drop method all along. I guess this is the easiest way to do it for now.

No, theres no way of doing this unless you set up rsync on a linux box. I would like something like that as well. Someone at empeg mentioned they would work on this in their copious free time..... Maybe mike could figure out how do that with jemplode?

Sean

Maybe mike could figure out how do that with jemplode?

Jemplode will already do something similar. If you upload a directory that is already on the empeg it will only sync the new files. Not quite as good as it could be since it won't pick up changed or deleted files, but still useful. emptool if supposed to do this as well although it never worked properly for me.

No, theres no way of doing this unless you set up rsync on a linux box.

Emptool on Linux won't do the date-changed thing, but it will (if you "upload -p -r") upload only those songs which are not already on the player. (It checks by track name or playlist name.)

Peter

emplode shouldn't do. If the folder you drop has subdirectories with the same names as already existing playlists, the playlists will not be duplicated. I'm not convinced that the .m3u import won't do the wrong thing.

If the files already exist on the player, they won't be copied. For already exist, read "have matching tags, for reasonable values of 'matching'".

Firstly, if I understand the question correctly, the drag-and-drop method does almost exactly the right thing in emplode. It's not a one-button solution, but it's quite useful.

Secondly: http://www.differentpla.net/~roger/empeg/car/rsync.html

With a bit of modification, you can get this to rsync to/from a Linux box.

Cool! It works, have you had a chance to look at the id3 parser setup? Jemplode doesnt read my id3 tags.

Sean

have you had a chance to look at the id3 parser setup

Well, I don't know where mschrag has been hiding lately since he is the one you want to answer that question, but I do know that he changed the id3 tag parser in version 33 I believe. The older parser seemed to work quite a bit better for me so you might see if you can dig around on the jempeg site and find an older version or try the last official release version. It is missing some of the cooler features, but the id3 parsing worked better (at least for me).

-Mike

sorry, i saw mike at the bottom of the post and thought you were mschrag. I think he got an ipaq, and is busy hacking on it.

Sean

Is there any word on a feature to sync files back to the PC in a folder structure that mimics the empeg's playlists? (Or you could highlight your "Artists A-B" playlist and tell it to download to a certain folder on your PC - creating all neccessary folders)? I know that we were told that someone at empeg was working on this - but gave us no promises. I'm not asking for any promises, but I'm wondering if this has been done yet... maybe as a stand alone program? (Us windows users need to back up our songs too.)

I guess that Jemplode has a similar feature... but I'm not sure how it works.

I've just finished a first working version of a tool that does exactly this.

It's a tool that scans a tree of MP3 files on a Linux box, and creates symbolic links and playlists in fid format, exactly mimicing the file structure layout on the empeg.

After it's finished, you can use rsync to upload the files to your empeg. Then you delete the database file on the empeg and let emplode recreate it. It works!

The cool thing is, you can now re-upload everything and rsync takes care just to transmit the differences. If an ID3 tag gets changed, only the tag is re-transmitted, not the whole MP3 file. Although this probably is not true when you change ID3v2 tags, which are inserted at the beginning of the file.

A first test with some 10 albums worked fine.Currently, I'm re-uploading everything (70 GB) to my empeg to see whether that works as well.

My tool is written in C, uses libmad to scan MP3 files and id3lib to read ID3 tags. Both libraries are available for both Windows and Unix. But the problem is, Windows does not have symbolic links, so I guess this will run on Linux/Unix only.

Let me know if you're interested, I might finish the rough edges and make it available.

Pim

Looks nice! Are you going to come to the meet in two weeks and demo it to us?

Mmm.. perhaps a replacement for my aging empsync scripts..

Looking forward to hearing more.

-ml

This sounds exactly like what I want. I'd definitely be interested.

In reply to:

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If an ID3 tag gets changed, only the tag is re-transmitted, not the whole MP3 file. Although this probably is not true when you change ID3v2 tags, which are inserted at the beginning of the file.

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Rsync should be able to deal with changes (including additions and deletions) at the beginning of a file just as well as at the end. So I don't forsee problems with that.

OK, in order to be able to safely visit the European Empeg Meet 2002, I released a first version of mp3tofid, even
though it's missing some features I had planned.

Read the announcement in the Programming forum.

Have fun,
Pim