I just spent a couple of hours fiddling with the .m3u generation code, with no luck. It just has too much random disk access to do, which makes it rather slow.

For each playlist, it has to open/read/close the tagfile, and then open/loop-thru the corresponding fidlist file. For each tune, it has to open/read/close the corresponding tag file. This amounts to a lot of random access on the drive, and a ton of directory look-ups. The Linux ext2 filesystem in the kernel is pretty lousy (linear search) with directory lookups in LARGE directories.. like the /fids/ dir.

Not much to be done, unless we want to reverse-engineer the database file, instead of using the raw data in /fids/

If you (or anyone else) can figure out (from emptool sources) the format of the database file, then we can use that for a dramatic speedup.

As for backup programs, I use use mirrordir, an excellent Linux/unix FTP mirroring program.

Cheers

-ml