If we can work out how to talk to the PC USB driver, I assume it won't have a com/corba interface?

We wouldn't necessarily need to talk to Empeg's installed USB driver if it's somehow proprietary. Then again, if we could, it'd probably make our lives easier. But talking directly to the Windows USB interface (skipping Empeg's driver) should have a lot of supporting example code in the MSDN literature so it wouldn't be an impossible task.

However, it's possible that the USB from the empeg to the PC would be slow (as it's unlikely to be optimised for large files going back to the PC).

Even if this were true, it would still be faster than a serial port, I'd think.

It's also very likely that the player wouldn't be able to write the files into a "Taxi" subdirectory,

Sure it would. You can create whatever folders you want at the Linux end. Right on the music partition. I'm pretty sure that the Emplode "free space" count would be correct, too.

You have to mount the music partition R-W, but that can be done programatically. We'd make sure the software handled the necessary stuff for this.

Finally, if the Sync protocol changes, the Taxi program would need modification.

No, not if we wrote our own programs to do the work at both ends. If it's our own code doing the file transfers, then we're not dependent upon Empeg's synch code at all.

Then again, if we talk through Empeg's drivers, the coding would probably be simpler. I'm guessing that their high-level "send a file" and "receive a file" functions in their drivers wouldn't be changing much over time. The stuff that would tend to change a lot would be the functions related to the player software and the database, stuff we wouldn't be touching.

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Tony Fabris