I've just finished a first working version of a tool that does exactly this.

It's a tool that scans a tree of MP3 files on a Linux box, and creates symbolic links and playlists in fid format, exactly mimicing the file structure layout on the empeg.

After it's finished, you can use rsync to upload the files to your empeg. Then you delete the database file on the empeg and let emplode recreate it. It works!

The cool thing is, you can now re-upload everything and rsync takes care just to transmit the differences. If an ID3 tag gets changed, only the tag is re-transmitted, not the whole MP3 file. Although this probably is not true when you change ID3v2 tags, which are inserted at the beginning of the file.

A first test with some 10 albums worked fine.Currently, I'm re-uploading everything (70 GB) to my empeg to see whether that works as well.

My tool is written in C, uses libmad to scan MP3 files and id3lib to read ID3 tags. Both libraries are available for both Windows and Unix. But the problem is, Windows does not have symbolic links, so I guess this will run on Linux/Unix only.

Let me know if you're interested, I might finish the rough edges and make it available.

Pim