Changing family of many metas I've got a few hundred meta balls making up an object. I'd like to duplicate it, and convert it to a mesh.

It seems that the duplicated metas end up being in the same family as the originals, so everything gets converted to mesh.

Is there any way to duplicate a bunch of metas, and convert them to a new meta family?
According to the wiki the family of a meta is defined by its name. Since the names of objects in Blender are automatically generated when duplicating them I don't think it is possible to copy metas into a new family.

There might however be a workaround for what you are trying to do: Select all your metas and copy them to a buffer by pressing [Ctrl+C]. Then convert the metas to a mesh. If you now press [Ctrl+V] the previous metas will be pasted from the buffer and you have your mesh and your metas.