tom,

you can browse by genre, artist and albums and build up playlists that way - have a mooch about the slim devices site and see if there is a list of compatible playlist formats it's not something i've looked into so cant say for sure. there is an active squeezebox forum / mailing list you may want to check out too.

the network enabled drive is basically a big hdd with an os running on a simple processor see here - http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10156.

cheers

julian