Jeez, my last post was three years ago?

Well, a 14233 song shuffled playlist just finished on Sunday, and I actually need to think about my car player. I haven't loaded a song, updated hijack, or even had the player out of the car since everything got shuffled.

What's the current preferred way to load lots of songs, preferably in the $artist/$album structure? Wasn't the emplode app a bit annoying to do that, and jemplode was much easier? Do either emplode or jemplode still run? (and what was the deal with the last three versions of jemplode, anyway?)

Now that I've put the player in a dock for the first time in years, it's not picking up an IP address. Isn't there some kind of hardware failure that takes out the nic, but hijack works around the bus problems and lets the player boot? What options are there to get the hardware fixed these days?

I don't even know where to find the usb->serial and null-modem cables anymore!

Taking your points individually:

There are still varying results regarding how best to load up a blank player with a large music collection. There are two sub-topics to this:

1) For organization, the conventional wisdom is still to do artist/album structure, and to make sure that your PC's hard disk mirrors this desired structure.

2) For the issue of the quantity of music to try loading at once, people have still been getting mixed results. Some people seem fine with loading a huge amount of music at once, others need to break it up into smaller chunks to keep the player or the management software from crashing.

Jemplode or Emplode? I'm fine with using emplode 2.00 final for all my player management. Jemplode is also known to work well.

No IP address might be a hardware fault, or it might be something simple with the dock. Try plugging the ethernet cable and the power directly into the player, also make sure it's in AC/Home mode, and see if it gets a DHCP address. It also might be hub issue: Some hubs and switches don't play nice with the player.

Hardware faults, if in fact yours turns out to be one, can still be repaired.

Cool, so the biggest change is that I've forgotten lots of details. Thanks, Tony.