I posted this months ago and in the meantime I have not been able to come up with a workable solution for keeping the songs from my mp3 collection updated on the Rio player.

Mostly the problems revolve around the following:

* Rio throws away the filenames on upload

* Rio uses mp3 tags to name the songs (instead of the filename which allows more characters and more precise matching)

* The command line tool supposedley will allow you re-upload the same directory, while grabbing only new files but that does not work.

* Command line tool does not report back the fid to be used until the actual sync is happening,.. making it impossible to script the fid easily back into my database for building sync lists (lists of files to upload, or remove on the Rio)

All of this makes me seriously wonder how anyone else keeps a large collection synced up with their car player. The reply posts I got the last time I posed this question were not very helpful overall,.. although I really appreciate everyone taking a stab at it.

Matter of fact the most promise post turned out not help at all. It was suggested that I simply use the following command:

upload -p -r /mp3/*

And that would skip upload on all the files already on the Rio. But the (undocumented) -p switch doesnt seem to do anything on my version of the command line tools (emptool version v1.03), as far as I can tell. But I should at least be grateful that it doesn't work as badly as the Windows tool which not only uploads the same files again, but creates duplicates of the same name on the Rio. At least emptool doesn't create duplicate files, it just wastes time uploading the same files again.

I've also saw that people were suggesting that I somehow use the CSV download feature to drive my syncronization scripts. Well unless somebody knows something I don't, the CSV database is useless to me. It seems that the CSV database is using the ID3 tag of the song, instead of the filename. Well, many songs have the same ID3 tag. This is because ID3 chops off the song titles (and artists sometimes too) because of character limitations. Songs like:

Five For Fighting - 04 - Superman (It's Not Easy, Bob Clearmountain Mix).mp3

.. end up getting chopped off and the end result is the regular mix and clearmountain mix get the same ID3 tag. Not exactly sure that example is 100% factual but you get the idea.

I also saw posts saying that I should use ls -R in emptool to produce a list to drive my sync scripts but this is just as useless as the CSV file, for the same reason. The artists and songs get chopped and are impossible to reverse match using a simple fixed length chop.

Hmm, i guess i could rename all of my songs to make sure that the first 30 characters of Artist and Title are unique, then a chop and reverse match might work,.. but what a pain in the ass that would be. Not to mention my collection would be full of mangled artist and titles simply to suit Rio. Then again I guess I could achieve the same thing with symlinking the entire collection using the mangled unique names. You can see how these "hacks" would get unweidly very quickly,.. script to generate the mangled symlinks, etc.

I even saw one post that said why dont you just use the Emplode tool and fish around in Windows explorer dragging and dropping the new files onto Emplode? Well I have 90GB worth of mp3s, so even though my directories are 100% organized and strict, fishing around through 16,000+ mp3s is no fun. And certainly out of the question. Uploading a few files becomes an hour long ordeal.

This isn't a bitch session, but I feel it's important for the Rio developers to know that out in the field, in real world, the management tools absoultely SUCK. I have had no problem coming up with sync scripts for keeping home, work and laptop mp3 jukeboxes in sync. But this Rio thing still poses major hurdles, due to the seemingly bizarre choices of the developers when they built the Rio database management system.

And although the last go-round yielded no helpful advice, I'm still listening so I'd love to hear from anyone else trying to manage a huge collection on the Rio. What are you guys doing out there? I'm getting ready to go on a rip/encode marathon, adding another 10,000 or so mp3's to my collection so I am really hoping someone out there can provide some insight on hy they are making it happen on their Rio.

Thanks, Aaron Newsome

[stop the technology madness]