Okay, this is a call for somebody to implement something that is (1) useful, (2) moderately easy (for a kernel hacker), and (3) a freakin' great way to get involved and become a Hero!

All Empeg/RioCar units have a USB-slave port, even the "lowly" Mark-1 units. But currently, this uses a dedicated (though "open") protocol, which only talks to the Rio tools, like Emplode.

But.. since it's all done in Kernel space, we have source code for it all. So..

Let's modify the driver to emulate a USB-ethernet adaptor.

This mostly would involve just changing the way the existing driver identifies itself over the link, and then tying the read/write interface into the Linux ethernet driver models. Lots of example code exists in the kernel today for all of this, so figuring out what has to be done is not impossible for a moderately skilled hacker.

Why? Because this would then make the Empeg, any Empeg, appear to be ethernet connected to the host computer. This means that standard applications built upon TCP/IP would then be able to communicate with it under Windows, Linux, or any other OS that supports USB-Ethernet adaptors.

This would enable FTP, HTTP connections to the player, without an ethernet card or hub, even to a Mark-1 player!

CL, Eh?

All we need is somebody willing to have a run at it (I'm booked).