Ok, I've read through all the threads on jEmplode and the various sorting issues in the latest version (69.0000000<some # of 0's here>1) so I *think* this may fall into the same boat, however I also thought someone might be able to add a few datapoints. In addition, I've got some other weirdness going on.

Just purchased my second empeg, a mark 2a (and will be sending my original baby off for some upgrades to the Eutronix guys soon). I wiped it completely and installed alpha 8 (I need the ogg support, 75% or so of my collection is in ogg). Put Hijack 419 on. Changed the anna vu background... you know, all the usual stuff.

I Fired up jEmplode (been using only jEmplode with my original empeg for a long time, since I only use linux) and started syncing my music collection. I have a moderate sized chunk of music (around 50 gig or so) so I divided it up into small manageable chunks and did several uploads and syncs. Now here's where the weirdness sets in.

First, like other people, I am having some *major* weirdness going on in the jEmplode sorting. I have to confess up front I'm not using soups at all (to be honest, I haven't really taken the time to thoroughly understand them). I normally just arrange my playlists as (Artist|Genre|Collections)->(Artist Name|Genre Type|Source of Collection)->(Album)->(Song) and I meticulously tag everything before transferring to the empeg. I keep everything except the actual track lists sorted alphabetically and the track lists themselves are sorted in track order. Everything actually lives under the Artist heirarchy, and I make links as appropriate to also sort them under the Genre and Collection subcategories (a poor man's soup, I'd imagine, and a ton more work doing it my way I'm sure).

However, no matter what sort order I set on the playlists, once I sync them to the empeg and go to down->down (the Artist list, if I haven't confused everyone thoroughly enough quite yet) shows as sorted alphabetically but WITHOUT the wonderful "The ..." frobbing (so all my "The Black Keys" etc albums are under T, not B). They show up properly in jEmplode, but do not show up sorted the same way on the actual empeg when I'm navigating the playlists. I even sorted it in reverse order, set the playlist order and resynched, expecting my ZZ Top to be at the top of the playlist now and nope... it's still at the bottom, with my AC/DC at the top. I just can't convince my empeg to honor the playlist order set in jEmplode no matter what I do.

On another unrelated note, my empeg is doing a file system check on EVERY sync. This is only happening on the new one, not the old one. I even disabled the filesystem check on sync in hijack, and it still does it. I probably need to shell into the machine tonight and run an fsck by hand to see what is up, but I thought before I did that someone might have some insight.

-- Gary F.