Hacking the PMM

[mkosma]

I understand that the plsign utility is needed to sign playlists, and that for an unknown reason (probably some licensing restriction)  Phat only distributes a Linux (and Mac?) version, but not one for Windows.

As a result, Windows users are stuck with PMM, and cannot do something as simple as assembling a full package of perl scripts (as I tried to do) to manage the copying and updating of files on the DMS.


One thing I've wondered is the possiblity of reverse engineering or otherwise making the plsign utility run under windows.  Anybody have further insight about this?

[sprockkets]

hmm, probably because a windows version isn't necessary for operation. I feel your pain. I hate any windows software, and if it wasn't for such a great way of having so much music in my car, I wouldn't bother with Phat Noise. I installed their software and as usual changed my mp3 codec to microsofts castrated version, which prevents me from encoding 44.1khz sampling rates. No big deal, I just reinstall my good old divx3 codec . Then it takes up a freakin 300mb + space (this is just the music manager for my Kenwood unit), and does absolutely nothing special. And the nerve of you opening IE when it is such a crappy browser when the default is Firefox!

Well, you could always download Knoppix from www.knoppix.net, and run linux from a disc, which won't change anything on your computer. You might even like it so much you may ditch crappy windows all together...

[sbingner]

vmware

[judb]

Right now VMWare has a beta of the 5.0 release thats open to the public.  Check out www.betanews.com and do a search for VMWare... the link you follow will let you download and sign up to get a temp key.

[Vince]

There's gotta be half a dozen good ways to get the funcionality of plsign in Windows.  After seeing the creativity put into getting other hard drives to work in the box, it's even dissapointing.  Here's some ideas to get you started:

The PMM obviously contains code that does the same thing as plsign, try to strip that out into a standalone program (that's gotta be really hard, probably illegal)

Do some sort of script that automatically launches the PMM, and saves and ejects the drive.  That'll update the sigs.  (that can't be that hard)

Do a Google search for "running linux programs in windows".  The second link will point you to a sourceforge project that should solve this problem for you.  (this is very trivial.  Why hasn't anybody else tried this yet?  5 minutes on Google will get you answers to tons of stuff)

The vmware/knoppix solutions have already been mentioned.

Get a free linux shell account somewhere.  Set up a web script to sign the playlists. (not too difficult)