There's a confusing plethora of tools to manipulate one's empeg music and I'm struggling to find one that I consider the best (acceptable even). I'm having some problems and hoped for some advice. I have about 1000 albums sorted into an Artist/Album directory structure, all mp3s with correct ID3 v2.3 tag info.

Emplode2 (Windows XP)
Dragging an artist's directory onto the playlists folder creates appropriate playlist entries, but for one of the artists (of the 3 I'm testing with) the soup data is entirely missing (well, all shown as 'None' in fact) and that's 100% repeatable. I could not correct that or see any reason why that artist's music files were any different.

Emptool (RedHat 8)
'Upload'ing the same artists had no such trouble, but then it apparently doesn't show any soup data and I've no idea whether what it does display is taken from the ID3 tags or the directory structure. However, it sync'd perfectly, even sending some spurious files (Mac's .DS_Store) up to the empeg which is NOT clever.

Jempeg/Jemplode2 (MacOSX 10.3)
First version I tried couldn't even find the same empeg using broadcast over ethernet. Direct entry of the IP address worked, but other things didn't once it had downloaded the database, like it couldn't delete tunes/songs.

Tried a later release of Jemplode2 and that seemed to cure the above problems. But having downloaded the database (after the upload from emptool above) there is NO soup data. The playlists are there, but the soup folders are empty.

When downloading the database from the empeg, where does the soup data come from?

I deleted everything and dragged the same artist directories onto the playlist folder I wanted and all is apparently well, with the correct data (well almost) showing in both the playlist folder and the soup folders.

Am I correct that the playlist data is created from the directory structure and the soup data is from the ID3 tags?

Why are 75% of the songs in the genre named '17' and not 'Rock' where they should be and indeed are ID3 tagged as such. 'Open'ing these entries and simply OKing the dialog box (the correct 'Rock' genre is already displayed) seems to fix it as this entire genre then disappears and they all correctly appear in the 'Rock' genre.

I then removed all the playlists, so only the soup data was there and sync'd. Ages later and all the music has apparently been uploaded to the empeg, but I'm buggered if I can find it there. The playlist section is simply empty.

So what's the point of all the soup data then?

How come music I'd uploaded with emptool had NO soup data when downloaded to Jemplode, yet when the same music is uploaded via Jemplode and the database later downloaded back again, the soup data IS there? Where is it stored differently by those 2 programs and why on earth would they do it differently.

Maybe there's a way through this maze, all I want is to take the data structure I've painstakingly created on my hard disk and put it down onto the empeg - not such a tough request I would have thought, but I've really no idea what is going on here.

Why doesn't someone (sorry, beyond my capabilities) write an interface to iTunes? Let that be the front end for manipulating playlists, maintaining the tags etc and then some form of plug-in to simply sync that down to the empeg. Adding anything that isn't there, replacing anything that's changed and deleting anything that should no longer be there - just like for the iPod. Now that WOULD be GREAT.