I just got my 60GB Rio player and I probably will have a few posts with some of the things I'm not too happy about. Don't get me wrong,.. overall the player is awesome and there is nothing like it on the market. But I think unless I write some better tools or find some, it will be a nightmare keeping my collection of mp3's on my home jukebox in sync with my player.

Here is the deal. I have *a lot* of mp3's. I actually slimmed down my collection from about 12,000 files to around 3,800 that I have put on the Rio. The other 8,000 files are not on my home jukebox but on a server at work. I am only concerned with keeping the home jukebox in sync with the Rio. The directory that I need to sync with the Rio follows a *very* strict format. All (almost all) of my files are ripped and encoded by me so the tags, bitrate and naming are very strict and enforced by my scripts that run on my home jukebox. Everything is really driven by a mysql database and perl scripts and it's really not important here. What is important is that I can see no way with either emplode or emptool to keep the player and my mp3 directories in sync.

My directories look like this

/mp3/o/Oasis/What's The Story Morning Glory/Oasis - Wonderwall.mp3

The top level directory /mp3 is just the mount point. Next are a series of 0-9a-z directories. To correspond to the first letter or number of the artist name. The scripts make sure the 'Til Tuesday get's stuck in the "t" directory and that "3 Doors Down" get stuck in the "3" directory.

So immediatley when I got the player I wasted no time to get my whole collection on there. I poked around in emplode for a few minutes and then came to the conclusion it was braindead in that it had no way of specifying a top level directory to grab all the mp3's from. I later figured out that I probably could have dragged and dropped the 0-9a-z directories on the hokey emplode window. Anyway, I found out that the emplode tool had an upload command with the -r (recursive) option so I used this. I think it was something like:

upload -r "/mp3/*"

The emptool chugged away for a few seconds,.. blurted a whole bunch of screenfulls of filenames and then sat waiting for a new command. I braced myself,.. entered the sync command and sat and watched for a few minutes. 30+ hours later the files were done. Now comes the hard part.

I buy new cd's every week and almost daily for more than 2 years now, I will normally add new mp3 files on my home jukebox. That's right. Every single day I add files to my jukebox. Sometimes it's ripping another track off a previously ripped CD or ripping a new CD all together. Either way,.. I rarely rip entire CD's, usually just the songs I like.

Neither emptool or emplode seem very adept at handling the task of keeping the Rio in sync with my mp3 directory. When ripping 50 songs on 50 different CD's,.. is it expected that I will poke around in my directories and individually select 50 different songs and put them in their proper directories in emplode? I think that sounds like a major pain. It would be much easier to just select the top level mp3 directory and the tool would know to grab anything that's not already in the Rio and transfer it. emptool doesn't seem to be any better at this. Not only that but emptool doesn't seem to be very scriptable,.. not without using expect or some crufty 2 way filehandles from Perl.

In any case there has to be people out there who have figured out how to keep their mp3 directory synced with the player. Taking suggestions, code examples, flames and whatever else you can send my way.

Thanks, Aaron Newsome

[stop the technology madness]