Sheesh. Right when I'm trying to be lazy about a new feature request, the friggin' SWAT team comes in. Thanks a million, guys.

My responses:

->tfabris:

Depends on the situation. But sometimes it could be easier, yeah. If the songs are already on the player and I don't have them on my PC's hard disk. I can find the FIDs of all the files I want to lyric-tag just by looking at the "all tracks" list in Emplode. The operation to rename all the lyric files would take just a few minutes, and would be followed by a single quick FTP upload. Rather than multiple download/tag/re-upload passes with the full song file.

Okay, anyone who currently has MP3 files *only* on your empeg, and doesn't have them on a hard disk or CDROM somewhere, raise your hand. Now, imagine that, as your hands are up, your empeg hard drives suddenly burst into flames. You now need to either re-rip your entire collection, or spend a couple months on KaZAA or the like. I kinda thought that, as smart empeg owners, we all kept backups of our MP3's on a more stable medium. Am I wrong?

Having said all that, I still think that your strategy takes longer, despite my stupid one-file-per-pass utility. Especially with TheAmigo's script which I could probably package up for Windows as a standalone binary so you wouldn't need Perl on your system. Even without it, I'm thinking I could tag MP3's with LRC's faster than I could find FID numbers and rename the LRC's that way. I understand the thing with not having to use Emplode and transfer megabytes of files. That's a legitimate win with the separate file strategy.

->genixia:

I wonder whether reading a simple text file will be quicker than parsing the mp3 file with id3lib (or friends, can't remember which one you're currently using). If it is, then this idea surely has to be considered.

Regardless, we need to open up the ID3 tag so we can read comments and other custom ID3 fields (for the custom info screen) that will be supported in future releases. So this new file is an added step, not a replacement for reading the ID3 tag. That being said, I'm not sure it would be a devastating performance penalty, just one that I wasn't ready to consider because really, I think the process of manually shipping these "auxiliary FID" files over is no easier than tagging the files in the first place.

I think that the idea is worth coding up and testing

Probably. I'll see what I can do. Unless someone wants to write a patch for me...