Well, I'm on day 2 with my empeg.

On day one, I hooked mine up via ethernet (because I don't have a USB capable machine, I'm on NT4). I got the Ethernet working no problem, first by setting up a DHCP server on my linux box....then I changed the empeg's settings to static address and turned the DHCP server back off. Works totally great. It was very easy. I think the people having problems with ethernet are possibly not as savvy about network config issues. USB is much easier I would guess...just plug and play.

Round 1

At any rate, i tried my first sync with a small batch of 30 songs. Maybe 200 MB total. It took 3-4 hours. Talk about slow! However that was actually going through a narly network path:

linux samba shared volume ->through hub->through wireless ethernet card on NT box->mounted on NT->copied through emplode->pushed out wireless ethernet card->through net hub->out to Empeg unit.

And all the while that transfer was going on, I was doing some other heavy downloading on another machine, but through the same net hub...

Round 2

Ok, so round two I decided not to copy off linux net volumes. this time I put a CDR disc into my NT machine and tried to copy straight from there..using emplode. I did a little bit of surfing on another machine during this too, but not too much... this time it took 2 hours..but to copy an entire CDR...650MB. Still pretty damn slow. But getting better.

Round 3

I installed 1.01 OS on empeg...and installed 1.01 emplode. I got rid of the wireless ethernet adapter and plugged a regular 10mbps card into my NT laptop. I also got a cross connect ethernet cable and plugged the NT machine directly into the Empeg. Guess what...did a whole CDR in like 10 minutes. 650MB. I'm not kidding. It was REALLY fast. I couldn't be sure...but I was counting off maybe 7-10 seconds per song(and my songs tend to be 5-7MB each in 190kbVBR).

So...I was definitely getting something between 500kbps-1000kbps....which is plenty fast as far as I'm concerned. I want to try the wireless card again with cross connect cable to see if the hub is causing the bottleneck. Its probably a little bit of everything. Anyway, its going super fast now!

cheers
-steve
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