I arrived home to Emplode sitting at the home screen and I just threw another album over. The database rebuild took about the same length of time as before... about 12 minutes.
Next thing I'm going to try is running the fidsifter via Hyperterm and the serial port, but not tonight.

Thanks, Mark, for the tip about the error message.
Thanks, tanstaafl, for sharing your .bat file.
I should learn more about how to take it farther.

Here we are, better than a year later and I've just now gotten my head around running fidsift from HyperTerminal. I'm much more lazy than stupid. lol

Of course, in the intervening months, I've loaded several gigs onto the empeg and also changed operating systems (WinME to Win2k) on my PC, so there were a few things to sort out at first.

Emplode reports about 12GB free of 111GB available (2x60GB drives). It took a while, but Emplode finally listed 25588 tracks under the 'All' header.

At first I tried running tanstaafl's script, but couldn't determine successful completion of fidsift. I could get the player into a horrible mode that ate up memory and made the player unusable until the next power cycling. The player would take 15-20 seconds to register button presses, for example. After a reboot, all would be well, but I couldn't really see improvements in database rebuilds or 'big mix' playlist building.
Emplode always insisted on full disk checks, too, which took a lot of time to get through. Obviously, I was doing it wrongTM.

Dropping back to the serial port and COM1, I dove in via HyperTerm and executed the fidsift file (the batch file was successful at delivering the file via FTP, just not executing it all the time). Via HT, I watched as fidsift built 80-something directories and completed happily after a little more than 15 minutes. A second running took only a few seconds.

Now, database rebuilds are definitely less than 10 minutes and 'big mix' playlist builds take only 10 seconds! Ahhh

I'd like to know if it's possible for me to make two connections at once to the empeg... one serial port and the other ethernet. If I could do that, I could watch HT for action while testing the batch file via FTP. I'd like to know what it's really doing.

So, yah- it's completely possible to execute fidsift.sh via tanstaafl's batch file (ethernet) while viewing a Hyperterminal session (COM1).

The batch file is working well now. I suppose there must have been something about ftp connection time-outs during the time that fidsift.sh was trying to do its job. Running the file directly via Hyperterminal the first time seems to have sorted everything out. The batch file can easily take care of shorter sortings.

I was getting 'nomem' errors regularly after running the batch file sifts, so I added one more line to fidsift.txt file:
literal site reboot
No more worries after a reboot!

Hmm.. I still have issues with Emplode doing a full disk scan after running fidsift from the batch file.
It seems that the windows ftp is timing out before fidsift is finished and then (I'm guessing) leaving the drives mounted rw.

So, I went looking around online for help with the ftp command line and tried to find a way to make it *not* time out.
I wasn't successful in learning about ftp options.
I did find this knowledgebase article from MS that said the timeout is defaulted to 60 seconds and only a special hotfix will allow you to select a different setting by editing the registry.
Not good news.

I was able to execute fidsift through my Filezilla FTP client, but it, too, timed out! I could change the timeout settings easily, though, and it worked after that.

It seems that ftp.exe likes to time out after only 10 seconds, so that's weird. Filezilla was defaulted at 20 seconds and still timed out earlier than that! WTF? Changing Filezilla's timeout to 200 seemed to help, but more likely by that time fidsift had been run enough to finish what it had (stutteringly) started.

I wish I could:
a. get feedback to the cmd window of how things are going with the batch file execution steps
b. extend the timeout so that fidsift is not interrupted
c. know that the batch file has completed all of its tasks before the cmd window disappears in a puff of pixels.

Heck- maybe I should go about this a different way...
I've never delved into the config.ini file, but I have to bet that there's a way to use Mark's EXEC functionality to run fidsift all on the empeg. Am I wrong on that?

*sigh* It does work- it is working- sort of. I'd sure like to make it work better.

Just trying to remember how I do it, as I only ever connect using telnet or cuteftp, and it just works(tm)

Pretty certain I run it from a command prompt using telnet. Maybe I rw, rwm first...

Or could you not write it into the script to do the whole rw&&rwm&&fidsift&&ro in background in which case presumably an ftp timeout wouldn't be an issue.

You already are using Mark's EXEC functionality here, to run Mark's fidsift.sh on the empeg.

I strongly recommend that you (a) get yourself a real O/S to run FTP from , and, even better, (b) connect via the serial port and run the fidsift.sh command from there.

FTP is a dicey enough environment for this stuff, let alone trying to use it from an "O/S" that doesn't really grok the internet.

Cheers

LOL- I am also learning new things every time I attack the empeg and other facets of home computing.

Thanks for the input, Mark and Rory.

I prefer not to use the serial port because it means (whaa!) that I have to remove the empeg from my beautiful Mark Lord Home Dock, remove the power cord from the dock, fiddle with plugging in the empeg with cables from the back of the desk, and only then am I able to fire up HyperTerminal for the fun bits.
I was quite excited by the prospect of running everything with the empeg docked from a simple double-click.

As for the failings and weaknesses of MS and Win2k vs. the power of Linux, I can only say that I continue to learn and am not afraid of doing so. I know computing as a Windows experience, primarily, and am trying to set myself up with more options wrt OSes. It's a hobby that I'm having fun with, anyway.

Thanks again, guys!

??? Oh, you must have one of the 13 docks ever produced that did not have a serial port on the back!

Cheers

Actually, it does have one. I couldn't get it to work for me when I first set things up, so maybe I'm a dummy that just needs to review his install basics.
I don't know how to make the fan run, either.

I'll play with it tonight and see what I can come up with.
Thanks!

I'm sure it's worth bringing in July if you have no joy getting it going...