It's been stated that whilst the guys in Cambridge (R) are busy with other stuff, they cannot really commit to the likelihood that they will be able to build USB based download capability from the Rio Central to allow us to talk to the empeg car/Rio car from same. This means, in the short term anyway, there is no real chance we're going to be able to download ripped tracks/playlists etc. from a Central to a Car.

So here's the idea. Sort out a daemon that runs as a d in the background on the Car. It knows how to talk the protocol of one of the supported portables that the Central can talk to (choice of device yet to be determined - depends on the capability of the portable and how close it matches the Car). When plugged into the Central, the device identification exchange means that the Car know's it's talking to a Central, and identifies itself as a Rio XXXX (where XXXX is our emulated device type).

One smart bloke then writes an emulator to allow the Central to believe it is downloading material to a flat playlist device, such as an XXXX. The daemon on the Car will accept downloaded tracks and then place them into a special playlist under the root of the menu structure, which can be immediately played in track order.

The daemon running in background would be required to create tracks with appropriate FIDs on the correct mount points, allowing for database construction at boot time of the Car player. This would be the "synch".

This would provide us with a short-term fix to allow us to perform downloads from the Central, without interfering with the Player source, in a manner that is compatible with the database structure used on disk, without causing problems.

Comments, flames? Obvious mistakes, misunderstandings? Anyone reverse engineered any of the USB protocols for any of the Rio portables?