My idea is to connect the laptop drive to my PC (with an adapter) have Jemplode connect to an empeg emulator that thinks that that particular drive is the empeg and then sync locally.

You don't need Jemplode, you just need mp3tofid. Get it to create one of its magic symlink farms, then copy the whole lot onto your new drive with "cp -L" (which dereferences symlinks).

This only works if you're using Linux on your PC, of course, but then so would any other solution involving direct attachment of the drive -- the Empeg's ext2 filesystems can't be read or written from Windows.

Peter