As far as Samba goes, remember that Windows shares are a proprietary technology. I'd be much happier seeing it work as an FTP server like Mark's Hijack allows.

Once upon a time I thought it would be cool to have Samba on the empeg, but then Hijack came out with a lightweight, stable, reliable FTP service. Now I'm much happier having that in place than a buggy memory-hog implementation of a proprietary Microsoft protocol.

I don't want no stupid software organising my MP3s for me, I want access to the file system layer and use my own tools to organize the MP3s.

There's something you have to understand about the way things like the Karma and the Empeg work...

They are FAST.

In other words, they can instantly call up the track information, instantly display a menu of artists or playlists, instantly seek to any track in the collection... in fact, just about anything you can think of doing, these players can do it fast and can do it without interrupting the playback. In many cases, they can do it without even spinning up the hard disk.

Wanna know how they can do it?

It's because they use their own management software and their own database. If they had designed them in such a way that they worked from the loose raw MP3 information in a loose file system, then each of those operations would require scanning through the folders on the hard disk and re-reading the tag data. And that would be SLOW.

If they didn't use their own management software, they would not boot up so quickly, they would not index and search so fast, and you would be complaining about the poor performance.

And by the way, I think a lot of people who read this board (not just the Cambridge folk, either), might consider it a bit of an insult to call Emplode, Jemplode, RMM, and RMM lite "stupid software".