Hello everyone,

I'm a new empeg owner after lusting after one since the Mk.1 days. It is amazing. I'm an engineer and have been around computers and software for 20 years and I am incredibly impressed with the design and the elegant integration of the software/hardware components. Beautiful.

My problem is that after 3 days I've become spoiled and need to figure out what to do for a "home" mp3 solution.

Currently, I am using a i386 linux machine with two 160GB IDE drives and software raid0. The machine is a P133 and I'm using "mp3blaster" to play files to avoid running X.

Even before the empeg, the limits of file system organization of mp3s was becoming a problem. Symbolic links just don't cut it. My collection (approximately 2100 CDs) is encoded with 256kb/sec Fraunhoffer and organized into Artist/Album/Track-Title.mp3 which makes loading into the empeg simple.

I don't want to go back to mp3blaster after using the empeg. I want to use the empeg software (2.0b11 is wonderful) on my entire collection. Several possibilities occur to me:

1. Can the empeg be easily modifed to access an NFS file system when "at home" so that it has access to the entire song library? I imagine this would require two databases: NFS directory available and not...

2. Has the empeg player software been ported to i386 so that I can install similar software on my Pentium "library" machine?

3. Can the empeg be opened up and connected to 3.5" IDE drives so that I can get enough disk space? Would 48bit LBA be an issue? Will this ultimately be an issue when laptop drives exceed 136GB (or whatever the magic number is)?

4. Multiple empeg machines, but this is not really practical, as 3 would be required, each with 2x60GB drives. I would like to avoid this "solution".

My favorite is a port of the fantastic player software to i386. Unfortunately, I doubt that I have the skills to pull that off within a decade.

What is the rest of the group doing for a dedicated large-library mp3 player????

Thanks in advance,

Jim (who read the faq and didn't see any clues :^) )