Emplode dutifully adds a second copy of the song..

This is no longer strictly true in v1.1. Emplode will now detect duplicate tracks, based on all of the following tags being identical:

title, artist, source, year, duration, length

Currently, if it finds a duplicate, it skips it. It brings up a dialog box after the import, summarising what went wrong. I could probably get it to ask the user, but that means writing a Yes|Yes All|No|No All dialog box.

It's also clever enough not to duplicate playlists from folder names, under any circumstances. This means that you can pick up your entire collection and drop it onto emplode, and only the changes will be spotted.

Near the end of the sync when the emplode dialog says something like "Updating database", what is happening?

The tags used by the player (as opposed to the ID3 tags) are kept in the *1 files in the music partition. When it says "updating database", the player is compiling the *1 files into /empeg/var/database,playlists and tags. These are optimised to fit into memory (the disk's generally spun down, remember).

The player is smart enough to compile the *1 files outside of the sync. If the sync went wrong, it takes longer to load the database from disk, however. Also, since the disk is read-only at this point, it can't write the compiled version back, and has to do it every time it starts up.




Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg