Paul-
I'll have to read more about FIDs, but I recently got it into my head that the FIDs literally are the mp3 files (plus some empeg cataloging data), yes?
So deleting them while the prompt was pointed only at that particular drive I can understand.
(My brain wandered off into a different world where the catalog was built from all mp3 files on the drives. The catalog would be rebuilt of all mp3s afterward, thus avoiding conflicting data and saving the files on the drive. This doesn't make deleting them in a massive dump easy, though, because emplode doesn't allow specific drive access. I would then have to crawl through a long list of all the files and carefully select the ones to delete. I don't think that's the way it actually works, though, so as I said, my mind was wandering.)

Roger-
Thanks very much for the great explanation!
I believe I will do the work using the methods I'm most familiar with.

Thanks to you both!