I am eagerly awaiting my empeg to come today! If I create a folder called "singles", to contain only the latest hits and what not, and I create a playlist to play all of the songs in that folder, what do I do when I want to add more songs to the folder? Do I need to redo the playlist everytime, or can I have a playlist that knows to play all the songs within a specific folder such as "singles".

Thanks, I love this board.

There are no folders on empeg, just tunes and playlists. Tune files are all in a single directory (you don't see it). What you see are playlists and (depending on SW release) 'soup views', i.e. pseudoplaylists constructed from tags (by author, album etc). So, say you create a playlist 'Singles'. You can add to it whenever you rip a new single; you can also link the same tunes to some other playlist (say, by author, genre, remixer etc).

See what FAQ on riocar.org says on that (and on other themes - skim it at least; even better, read it, it's good reading material)

When you add new tracks to the playlist just drop them into your playlist and they will be added

But there is a better way

Empeg has many tricks up it's sleeve

say you have ten albums on your empeg with ten tracks each and out of these albums you have two of your favorite songs on each album. Go into emplode and copy them and paste them into a playlist called favorites so to play your favorite songs you just lay this playlist. This means you have a total of 120 tracks on the empeg.

WRONG you only have 100 tracks as when you copy and paste in emplode you are just creating a shortcut to each track.

This has a huge advantage as it also works with playlists i have my playlists arranged in two ways one is by genre and the other is A to Z so for example REM have an entry under Rock and also an entry under R if fact REM are also listed under my girlfriend playlists. But the cool bit is when you drop a new album into REM under rock it turns up under R as well. But this only works if you upload the tracks once to the empeg and then cut and paste around the playlist structure.

You'd simply drag the new tunes into the singles playlist in emplode and then when you play the singles playlist on the empeg... it will be in there. You'll get it when you play around with emplode... it's really intuitive.

The empeg doesn't have folders - all tunes are dumped in a pile (renamed to stuff like 10ab0) and another file containing the ID3tags is also created for each tune. That one is named the same as the tune but with a 1 at the end instead of 0 - the "tag" file for the example file mentioned above would be 10ab1.

When you drag and drop a folder from the Explorer into emplode (probably to the root node) that gets converted on the fly to a playlist, the files gets dumped into the big pile, but their new IDs (10ab0 etc) will get added to that playlist. Tag files will also be created, data is taken, in order of preference, from ID3v2, ID3v1, filename. When/if you edit the tags in emplode you will not change the actual ID3 tags in the *0 mp3 files, only the data that is stored in the tag file (*1).

If you put new files into the folder on the PC, you could drag-and-drop only those new files into the 'singles' playlist on the empeg (which looks like a folder in emplode, but isn't). In the 2.0bX software you can drag-and-drop the folder in exactly the same way you did the first time and files already existing on the player (supposing you haven't changed them in any way) will not get uploaded another time. Works for multilevel hierarchies too...

If you create for instance Mood playlists, your tune you put in the Singles playlist can also be put in the corresponding Mood, say Agressive, list by dragging (or copy / insert) a copy from the Singles list to the Agressive list. Don't drag from the Explorer to the Agressive list - that would upload another copy of the mp3 file, wasting space.

/Michael