differentpla.net

In response to this thread on the empeg BBS, I hacked together a couple of small tools for the empeg car player.

If you've ever gone looking for the music and playlists on your empeg, you'll find them in the /empeg/fids0 and /empeg/fids1 directories.

Instead of the descriptive filenames you might have been expecting, the files are all named with cryptic numbers.

The sequel to Partitioning an empeg's Hard Disk Manually.

If you're attempting to upgrade the hard disk in your empeg, and the disk builder is not working for you (this is often the case with disks larger than 60Gb), then you might want to build your new disk manually.

Here's how.

You can send the empeg player commands using the serial port. This is a list.

Problem/Context

• You've taken advantage of the recent "fire sale" at SONICblue to acquire a shiny new empeg. You'd like to clone your existing music collection to it.
• You didn't keep the tags up-to-date on your local PC.
• You don't have enough disk space to download the contents of your empeg to your local PC -- or you do, but can't be bothered.
• You can't get empegClone to work -- your serial numbers are the wrong way round perhaps.
• You can't be bothered to install hijack to get an ftp server -- besides, you can't remember how to get ftp to not ask you for every file when using mget, and installing ncftp on your empeg is a faff.
• You've got a Linux box, or a copy of cygwin.
• Your new empeg has the same number of disks in it as your old empeg, and they're the same size or larger. Without this, it gets complicated.
• You're a lazy bastard, like me.

Introduction

A while ago, I published my Lazy Bastard's Guide to Cloning your empeg. This has worked successfully for me and other people. However, it has one major limitation -- it's an all-or-nothing operation -- it clones the entire empeg. If you add a bunch of tracks to one of your empegs, you end up having to copy all of your tracks again.

In this document, I'll present an alternative: using rsync to keep a pair of empegs in sync.

This procedure is not without its limitations -- it only works one way, so you have to upload your tracks to one of your empegs (call it the master), and then replicate it to the other (the slave). For me, this isn't a problem.

emplode v2.0 adds the ability to search your music database. It provides two methods of doing this: simple searches (which are hopefully so simple that I won't explain them here), and advanced searches.

Syntax

search  ::= conj [or conj]*
conj    ::= term [and term]*
term    ::= item [relop item]
item    ::= literal | tag | "(" search ")" | not item
literal ::= dquote-char (alpha|numeric|punctuation)* dquote-char
          | numeric+
          | "true" | "false"
tag     ::= alpha*

Tags

Essentially, anything that appears in a *1 file is fine. We also allow the following pseudo-tags:

• fid
• refs
• new
• changed
• marked
• drive
• play_count
• play_last
• skipped_count