I am working on improved music management of the Empeg from Linux.

My own specific need is a way to have the Empeg "mirror" my massive
(8-12GB) music directory on my host (Linux) PC, including symbolic
links to various Genres from the original music (.mp3) files.

Add to this an auto-index generator for finding music faster on the
Empeg (the drives are MUCH bigger than a year ago..). Eg.

Playlists-->Artists-->F-K-->Heart-->Rock The House Live!

.. as well as a "random" playlist that automatically shuffles all songs
or just shuffles albums.

Most of this is up and running for my own system now,
as a pair of awk scripts (which can easily be attached to point-and-click
buttons under KDE or GNOME).

I just use the KDE/GNOME file managers to "manage" the music
collection on the (Linux) host, and then run the scripts to synchronize
and generate indexes on the Empeg.

This includes fixing up the song titles to full length, and setting
the Artist, tracknumber, and source (album) tags on the Empeg
based on the host machine filenames (rather than the truncated
tags within the .mp3 files).

All of this is done using the standard 1.0 "emptool" from Empeg.
Too bad "emptool" doesn't support the newer .mp3 tags
like "emplode" does.. second class again under Linux.

Does anyone else want this stuff?

.. as well as a "random" playlist that automatically shuffles all songs or just shuffles albums.

Say... That sounds pretty cool to me. But I'm just a dumb artist and Linux scares me. (Thank god I'm not using SGIs anymore.)

Brian
"chocolate coated, freakin', habit forming..."

If you have a web page for this project I will link to it from the Geek Site.

Rob

All of this is done using the standard 1.0 "emptool" from Empeg.
Too bad "emptool" doesn't support the newer .mp3 tags
like "emplode" does.. second class again under Linux.

Emptool 1.0 uses id3lib, so it should grok id3v2 tags just as well as id3v1. Emplode also uses id3lib to read tags, so the two should behave identically.

What exactly goes wrong when you feed emptool an id3v2-tagged file?

Peter

Okay.. I've released my first tool (of several in beta here) for dealing
with the Empeg player from Linux. This is what I use to mirror my massive /mp3 directory structure from a Linux host to the Empeg car player:

"empsync" is a command-line tool to mirror a Linux /mp3/ hierarchary
onto the Empeg player. It compares the host directories with that of
the Empeg, and uploads/deletes files as needed to maintain the Empeg.

It confines it's operations (for now) to a playlist hierarchy under /artists/
on the Empeg player, so folks can still have other playlists / links / separate from the automatically generated ones from the tool.

Get it! from : http://rtr.ca/empeg

More stuff coming soon:

"id3v2" -- a Linux tool for extracting/stripping/dealing with ID3 tags,

"mp3sort" -- takes a random dump of .mp3's and renames/organizes them into artist/album/track-song.mp3 format, extracting info from the ID3 v2 or v1 tags as needed. Uses "id3v2" internally.

"mkplaylists" -- creates both random and alphabetical groupings (playlists) by artist, album, track, whatever, for the Empeg from Linux.

Cheers

The web page for my Linux Empeg sync tools is:

http://rtr.ca/empeg

Looks like a good idea. A couple of questions though. Are you using the ID3 info at all? I like the idea of using folder names for artist name, etc. But, what about fields that you don't have in your directory structure like genre and date? Also, do you make any attempt to deal with mp3s that are not all the way down in the directory structure? For example when I have an artist's whole cd, I create directories like this...

/genre/artist/album/song

but, if I have only a song or two (one hit wonders, etc) I leave out the album directory. So...

/genre/artist/song

One last thing that would be cool was if you allowed the user to specify what directories where there and how they should be mapped to fields in the empeg's db so that you could do deeper/shallower directory structures to suit your needs.

Of course since it is just a script many people could make these changes themselves.

-Mike

>"id3v2" -- a Linux tool for extracting/stripping/dealing with ID3 tags

Please, please, please, I would kill for a nice command line tool that could traverse a directory structure full of mp3s and for each compare the ID3v1 tag to the ID3v2 tag and if one is blank set it to the value of the other and if there is a conflict ask the user which is correct. I have been unable to find a tool that will properly set both in all conditions so I ended up with a bunch of poorly tagged files. To make matters worse, I swear that the id3lib that the empeg uses sometimes gives the v1 tag priority over the v2.

-Mike

OOooops.. I found/fixed a small but nasty BUG .. about 10 minutes
*after* somebody did the first download of "empsync" moments ago.

If you have version 1.0, then toss it, and grab version 1.1 instead!

Thanks.

The id3v2 tool beta I am using internally does *almost* what you want..
While separating the v2 tags from the music content, it appends a v1 tag
to the music if one did not exist already. It would be trivial to add a flag
to force it to always create/replace a v1 tag based on the v2 info.

As for prompting.. life gets messier.

My best bet there would be to code up an awk script which
pulls out the v1tag (my "mp3sort" script already does this),
and uses "id3v2" to pull out the v2tag. Then a few lines
to compare & prompt the user .. presto.

email me if you want it -- maybe quote this msg and your original
as a reminder of what the heck we were discussing.

Cheers

Of course, so long as your .mp3 files are named in
artist/album/track.title.mp3 format, my "empsync" tool will
upload them and force the Empeg to use the artist/album/track/title
info from the filename, rather than either the v1 or v2 tags.

And my "mp3sort" script is what I use to get the filenames correct
to begin with, based on the v2 or v1 tags.. am I going in circles again :)

Nope, not using the ID3 info at all in "empsync".
Rather, I use the ID3 tags when first creating the files,
to name the tracks / albums / artists.. and then clean
them up by hand (eg. Chris de Burgh vs. Chris De Burgh).
Once the directory structure is set up under Linux,
"empsync" just mirrors it on the Empeg.

I plan to add support for symbolic links in the near future,
to allow things to appear in multiple places.

No direct support for genre (though emptool will still extract/set it during
the uploads).

For single tracks, I personally use:

artist/singles/songs.mp3

which preserves the directory levels in a consistent fashion.

The idea is that /artists/all/ is in a hard format required by the script,
but once I add symlink support you can remap it any way you please
under other headings..

-ml

Edited by mlord on 7/9/00 07:00 AM.

When I record using RealJukeBoxPlusV2 (win98),
the resulting .mp3 have an ID3v2 tag in front with
some binary info that confuses the Empeg car player.
Uploading with emplode seems to avoid the problem,
but uploading with emptool results in a front panel message
of "invalid mp3 format" when attempting to play such files.

Thus.. I now strip off all ID3V2 content just as a matter of course
(the binary attachments confuse other players as well,
and lots of mp3's have embedded binary images etc..).

the resulting .mp3 have an ID3v2 tag in front with some binary info that confuses the Empeg car player. Uploading with emplode seems to avoid the problem, but uploading with emptool results in a front panel message of "invalid mp3 format" when attempting to play such files.

Ooo! Ooo! I know this one!

Emplode, in a recent version, started storing in the database a bit of new information: The offset to the starting point of the actual song data. The player takes this into account when validating the file. Your tool doesn't need to strip the V2 tag, it just needs to write this value into the database.

Oh and one more thing: Word wrap is your friend.

___________
Tony Fabris

Thus.. I now strip off all ID3V2 content just as a matter of course (the binary attachments confuse other players as well, and lots of mp3's have embedded binary images etc..).

....and work around ID3V1 30 char limitation by assigning title, author and source empeg tag from file/dirnames (and once tracks are on empeg, you don't need ID3 tags any more). I forrgot to do that in advance, but it took me perhaps 10 minutes to assign artist and source fields from playlist names. Didn't even bother to write a script, a couple of vi regexes was all what it took. Ah, Windows-only (GUI-only, to be more precise) guys don't know what they are missing with scriptable character interface .

However, it does not mean I don't plan to check out several GUI front ends for emptool that are beginning to show up (one of them is around for quite some time - sorry I don't have author/link now). With Unix modular approach one can have it both ways :)

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green