I was thinking it was kind of useless., or maybe just a safety net for things that got uploaded but somehow did not make it into the playlist.

That is correct, that is one of the purposes of the Unattached Items folder. If you understand how the playlists work on the Empeg hard disk, you'll see that what you're describing is exactly the same as the behavior reported at the beginning of the thread.

Here's how it works:

When you add a song with emplode, the first thing it does is upload the song. Then it uploads the changes to the playlists. Then it rebuilds the database based on those changes.

Now, think for a moment about what a playlist is. It's simply a collection of links to other playlists, or links to songs.

So, if you upload the song file, but something goes wrong on those later steps, then the song itself is orphaned on the hard disk- there are no links which point to it. Hence "Unattached".

Now, if you think about it, this is exactly the same thing that happens when you delete a playlist halfway down the tree structure. You have removed a parent link to a branch, but the branch itself still remains (that collection of links).

If nothing else links to that branch, then it is also "Unattached". See? It's the same thing.

I think I know why the empeg doesn't automatically prune the playlists beneath the playlist you're deleting. It's because there's a possibility that it might be linked elsewhere, and there's (currently) no code to go checking to see if it's linked elsewhere. There's also the possibility that you might have done it accidentally, thinking that it was linked elsewhere, but in fact you just deleted the last link.

Personally, I like this behavior. It makes sure that I'm very serious about deleting a song before it goes ahead and does it. However, from a "Joe Consumer" point of view, it seems that it should behave the other way.

There's one other use for the "Unattached items" folder- for storing songs that you don't want in your rotation, but that you need to keep on the empeg for whatever reason. Shuffling the whole unit won't play the Unattached Items. For instance, if there is an album that you need to keep only for when your great grandma comes to visit, you can stick it in Unattached Items most of the time, and just do a quick synch to put it back into rotation as she's pulling up the driveway.

I use it in a similar way, now that I've got a Mark2 and Displayserver is available. I use the Unattached Items folder to taxi files between home and work. I create a big .zip of everything I want to taxi, rename it to ".MP3", send it to the Unattached Items folder, then retrieve it with Displayserver at the other location. Then I rename it back to ".ZIP" and unzip it.

(Hey, Dionysus, how about putting that one in the tips 'n tricks FAQ?)

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Tony Fabris