Here we are, better than a year later and I've just now gotten my head around running fidsift from HyperTerminal. I'm much more lazy than stupid. lol

Of course, in the intervening months, I've loaded several gigs onto the empeg and also changed operating systems (WinME to Win2k) on my PC, so there were a few things to sort out at first.

Emplode reports about 12GB free of 111GB available (2x60GB drives). It took a while, but Emplode finally listed 25588 tracks under the 'All' header.

At first I tried running tanstaafl's script, but couldn't determine successful completion of fidsift. I could get the player into a horrible mode that ate up memory and made the player unusable until the next power cycling. The player would take 15-20 seconds to register button presses, for example. After a reboot, all would be well, but I couldn't really see improvements in database rebuilds or 'big mix' playlist building.
Emplode always insisted on full disk checks, too, which took a lot of time to get through. Obviously, I was doing it wrongTM.

Dropping back to the serial port and COM1, I dove in via HyperTerm and executed the fidsift file (the batch file was successful at delivering the file via FTP, just not executing it all the time). Via HT, I watched as fidsift built 80-something directories and completed happily after a little more than 15 minutes. A second running took only a few seconds.

Now, database rebuilds are definitely less than 10 minutes and 'big mix' playlist builds take only 10 seconds! Ahhh

I'd like to know if it's possible for me to make two connections at once to the empeg... one serial port and the other ethernet. If I could do that, I could watch HT for action while testing the batch file via FTP. I'd like to know what it's really doing.