Recovering Playlists

I just got my empeg back from service - thanks guys! it's better than before! - but I discovered to my horror that my entire playlist had been deleted.

Is there any way to recover it? If not, then I will have lost 2 months of work in ripping and encoding, not to mention irreplacable songs, since I had to delete the mp3s off my computer to make room for new ones as I ripped, and thus do not have *any* of the music I uploaded.

Sorry - unfortunately not. We've talked to the US service center, but it appears they have been wiping disks so as to start fault diagnosis from a known state. This won't help you, but it shouldn't happen again in the future.

:(

Hugo

Jeremy --

That's a real bummer!

When you re-do your music, you might do what I plan on doing when I get my empeg: once the music is compressed on my hard drive, after I copy it to empeg I will also archive the MP3's on CD-R. You should be able to get about 12 hours on a single CD-R, at a cost of about a dollar. (depending on the bit rate you use for encoding, of course...)

I'm glad to see that your empeg is back and functional again.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

This situation makes possibility to back up the playlists imperative (as have been promised). BTW, will mp3s be found on CD drive, or will we have to restore them to original location on disk?

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
#5196

Backup will come - remember we're not at release yet, we're still in beta. The restore will allow you to incrementally find your files and restore them to the empeg, in multiple sessions if necessary.

Hugo

Yeah, that's nice and all if you have a CD-R drive. I spent all my money on the empeg! :)

Another idea:

You could create the ability to send BACK to the PC a "backup image", if the user has the drive-space to burn and wants to create an indelible backup of the empeg, including all settings, player software, etc.

Now the obvious "problem" is the potential (or rather the PERCEIVED potential) for MP3 piracy. Let's face it, that potential is there already. rz/sz is your friend, so on a developer unit, today, you can easily get out the MP3 files, albeit slowly. (Presuming that there isn't any black magic going on when they go INTO the unit).

What I am suggesting is precisely that... black magic. Make the files unusable (come up with your own algorithm, be creative), but SOMETHING that you can use to dump them back out to the PC harddrive, en masse (not as individual files, but almost completely like "dd if=/drive0 of=/on/the/PC/somefile" although there is obviously other stuff that would have to take place.)

First off, this is something people are going to want if they upgrade from MkI to MkII. I'm not going to want to dig through my 50 CD-R's of MP3's again, nor will many other people. The ability to say "Take this unit, dump its contents to file empeg_backup.emp, replace with THIS unit, restore its contents from empeg_backup.emp, and voila" would be VERY cool. This would also allow people sending their unit in for repair/replacement to make an image on their own, "just in case".

Just my $0.02 worth...

Awwww, c'mon -- I got my CD-R for $125 on ebay, new-in-box. And then found out I could have gotten one locally for under $100. They're really not that expensive anymore.

Besides, anybody who can afford an empeg must be pretty rich to begin with, right? ;-)

Seriously, how many hours do you think it will take you to recover all your music? I'll betcha that if you valued your time at even $2.00 an hour the CD-R would look like a bargain. Besides, Jeremy, you're enough of a computer geek to know that it's not a question of whether a hard drive will fail -- only a matter of when. If I were to fire up my time machine, go back to mid-November and offer you my CDR for twice what I paid for it, knowing what you know now I think you'd jump at the chance.

Good luck with your recovery, and remember the Prime Directive of computing: Back Up Early and Often. (OK, so I just made that up. But it SHOULD be the Prime Directive! ;-)

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"