"Unknown Album / Artist / Genre ...

[InfoProf]

I have a situation with Music Manager / Media Manager that I would like some help with.

I have a large library of music, all FLACs, nicely tagged using Mp3Tag. When I import these into PMM 2.30 I have about 30% of them show up in the directory with Unknown attributes. Of course, this makes it almost impossible to filter by those tags when I am in the car.

I have imported them into Media Manager (the PhatHack version, 0.9c?), and the tags seem to be parsed correctly - at least I do not see any "unknown"s showing up in the list of genres, artists or albums.

Unfortunately, when I ask Media Manager to recreate the DMS, I get a lot of blank entries when I play the DMS in the car. I assume these are equivalent to the "unknown artist" etc. when I have Music Manager create the prompts.

Can anyone advise me on how to have PMM (Music Manager) properly comprehend the ID tags that are in the files? I would rather use that software than Media Manager, as I do not need transcoding, and the copy to DMS appears to be significantly faster (yes, I have set Media Manager to the "do not transcode to this device" setting, but it is still painfully slow).

Thanks for listening, and for any help you can provide.

/Stephen Hayward, Canada

Just a footnote - my impression of Media Manager's transfer speed is without a benchmark. I just transferred 92GB of files to the DMS using PhatHack Media Manager, and it took just over 7 hours. Using Windows file transfer, it takes about 1 hour. Just wondering if there is something I've overlooked.

[VorTechS]

PhatHack Media Manager uses Taglib# for tag reading/writing which is an up-to-date media tagging library.  PhatNoise Media Manager is unlikely to have had any FLAC tagging support because IIRC FLAC tags use OGG containers to store them, which I don't think was supported by the PhatBox as this happened after PhatNoise implemented FLAC support.  Therefore, it's not something the PhatNoise guys would ever have written support for.

If you are having trouble with transfer speeds with PhatHack MM, have you tried setting the 'File Copy Buffer Size' to an appropriate setting?  
I recommend 3MB (3145728 bytes).  I've never tweaked the settings beyond this to do any proper benchmarking.  Also, one of the things I was very keen to do with PhatMM over PhatNoise MM was to make sure you the user, was fully aware of how things were going at any given point!  I hated the fact that with PhatnoiseMM you got this progress dialog which mostly kinda hung until finished.  So yes, the UI is updated frequently with progresses to keep you in the loop and this will take a little hit on the transfer times.

Now you mention you are using v0.9c.  In the beta program we are now running v1.0.7 which is a marked improvement in general on v0.9c.   (I'm looking for general release in the new year).
 
Although it says applications are closed, please sign up for the beta and I'll give you access to try it out.  I'll also help you look into the configuration you have to see if we can optizimize the speed somewhat and if necessary I'll see if there are any code changes I can make to speed things up.

[VorTechS]

I found your details on the PhatMM site and I've added you as a Beta tester, so you should have received your Beta Invitation.

Feel free to make use of the access and the updated software.  You should see in the Beta forums an FAQ which may help with the speed issue (basically as I outlined above).  There is at least another tweak you can make, by altering the TTS generation options to improve overall DMS writing speeds.

Please let me know how you get on over at the PhatMM forums where I'll do everything to help you get running as you should be!

[InfoProf]

the UI is updated frequently with progresses to keep you in the loop and this will take a little hit on the transfer times.

By all means keep the feedback! It's worth whatever it costs in time.

Thank you for the excellent feedback, VorTechs - I continue to be humbled by your dedication and support to my little problems over the years. I truly don't know where I'd be without you.

I'll get into the Beta, and keep you updated with my observations. I am quite ready to switch to your Media Manager product, and give up my fanatic attachment to Music Manager, especially after your explanation of the missing tags. I wish I had asked years ago when I first started experiencing the hassle of having to enter tags twice - once in Windows, then again in  PMM 2.30.

Thanks again - you truly rock!

/Steve

[Terry_Kennedy]

I have imported them into Media Manager (the PhatHack version, 0.9c?), and the tags seem to be parsed correctly - at least I do not see any "unknown"s showing up in the list of genres, artists or albums.

Unfortunately, when I ask Media Manager to recreate the DMS, I get a lot of blank entries when I play the DMS in the car. I assume these are equivalent to the "unknown artist" etc. when I have Music Manager create the prompts.

Before you eject the DMS, look in the PHTDATA partition. Somewhere in there, you should find a bunch of WAV files which are the announcements. Pick an album you know doesn't announce in the car and see if there's an WAV for it. If so, play it on the PC and see if it works properly.

I'm not familiar with PhatHack MM, but I do know that the PhatBox is picky about its files. That could be the problem.

If the WAV file isn't there, then PHMM apparently didn't generate it. As I said, I'm not familiar with that program, but the PhatNoise Managers tended to not generate announcements for music already on the DMS unless you specifically asked for it.

You could also try PhatVoice which is a stand-alone announcement generator for the PhatBox. Be sure to select the "Always Replace Output Files" box - it will take longer, but will guarantee that all announcements are re-created.

[VorTechS]

@Terry:

Once a user 'Saves' or 'Saves and Ejects' in PhatHack MM TTS then, dependent on configuration, the TTS files are generated.
The application allows you to:

Always Write TTS files (clears the TTS directory and re-generates them)
Generate Missing Only (checks on a file by file basis as to whether or not one should be generated)

So all the TTS files should exist - although the OP does say the issue is with PhatNoise MM failing to generate stuff correctly not PhatHack MM.  We'll do some more digging once there is some more feedback to see if there is still an issue once PhatMM gets generating the files.