"Yet Another Thread About Backups???"

Well... I just added capacity to my Empeg, and with 1.1 coming, I'm planning a massive re-organization of my MP3's. It's much easier to work with the files themselves via tags rather than move things around in Emplode. So I wanted a way to get my MP3's all back to my hard drive. I may be re-ripping some or all of my collection in the near future as well, depending on WMA support. Now that I have the space, I might as well use it!

Anyway, fvgestel's Displayserver 1.1 is a splendid program that adds a HTTP server, and makes this process very easy. However, I wasn't able to find ANY "Web Whacker" type programs to suck down the entire Empeg structure. Most of them wouldn't follow the playlist links properly, and regardless of configuration, couldn't save the MP3's with the proper filenames, or in the proper folders. The backup facility in displayserver is nice, but it creates one massive file that may be too difficult to work with. The other solution was a filename linker script that was written some time ago, but that doesn't work well with single MP3's, because it would try to create a structure based on the Album in the ID3 tag, and would therefore not replicate the structure properly.

Frank is working on a new server that may have other backup capabilities, but in the mean time, I have cooked up a Perl script that uses libwww-perl to suck down an enitre Empeg's music. It opens up the MP3list page, and recursively grabs your MP3's, and places them in the right folders. Right now I've only tested it in Windows, but theoretically all you should need to do is change some of the character substitutions for your platform.

Known problems:

1. If you have duplicate playlists, or songs in multiple playlists, it's just going to dutifully copy them down twice. In preparation for a backup, you may want to remove duplicate playlists to avoid this.
2. Frank's displayserver doesn't tack on track numbers, and in many cases, you don't want it to. If you have album playlists, this program will download them in the order they were added to Empeg. If you followed the directions in Tfabris' FAQ on importing files, this won't be a problem, because you can just sort by date to get them in track order. You DID do that, didn't you? (Track numbers may also be in your tags, and a program like MP3ext can help you out.
3. Does not address world hunger, but that's targeted for a future release.

I wrote this in like an hour, so it's not perfect, and doesn't have any command line options yet, you have to hard code your own paths. Anyway I'm going to attach it here, anyone who has Perl for Windows and libwww-perl, and wants to backup their Empeg database, should find this useful. I think I can turn it into an EXE file and remove the dependency on Perl, but I'll wait until I hear about someone being interested first. :)



-Tony
MkII #554