Hacking my PhatBox again...

[Terry_Kennedy]

As some of you have no doubt noticed, I've been absent from these forums for quite some time. This was due to a number of things, but mostly I just hadn't been updating the music on my PhatBox as I have quite a complicated system to do so (at nearly 2200 CDs, I'm well beyond the capabilities of PMM to handle the music). Looking at the catalog printout from my DMS, it was last updated on April 13th, 2004 - 3 and a half years ago.

The availability of 250GB IDE drives means I didn't need to bother with doing a SATA conversion for the DMS, PhatBox, and cradle. I'm using the WD2500BEVE mentioned in another thread here. I have about 50GB free after all my music is loaded.

I've just finished testing and I now have a DMS with 2192 CDs on it. They're all stored as single MP3s so I have gapless playback, but can still seek between tracks to pick songs I like / skip the ones I don't.

A DOS "dir" of the DMS ends like this:

Code Select Expand

     Total Files Listed:
           19353 File(s) 198,477,476,579 bytes
              38 Dir(s)  50,965,356,544 bytes free


In the 3 years I've been gone I see that a new generation of members have been generating handy new PhatBox tools and utilities.

I'll be hanging around here again to answer questions about PhatVoice and anything else I can help with.

[VorTechS]

It's nice to have you back, and your offer of help is certainly appreciated.
I'm actually at the point now, where I am starting to manipulate the DMS content - and could do with a wrapper for the DMS database manipulation so that people have the ability to switch between PhatHack Media Manager and PhatNoise Media Manager should they want to.

Personally, I don't particularly want to go back - but have the sense to recognise that people's preference may lay elsewhere.

If that's something you can contribute to, that would be fantastic, otherwise any information you can give me about the DMS database manipulation/requirements would equally be awesome.  All help will be appreciated!

[todd1010]

Glad your back, Terry!

[markbowen]

The availability of 250GB IDE drives means I didn't need to bother with doing a SATA conversion for the DMS, PhatBox, and cradle. I'm using the WD2500BEVE mentioned in another thread here. I have about 50GB free after all my music is loaded.

Well, that answers the question I raised in that other thread, whether the 250GB drives work or not.  Good to know.  I've still got 25GB to spare on my 160GB drive, though -- and I am running out of uses for the spare 80GB, 100GB, and 120GB drives which I already upgraded from my original 10GB DMS -- so I think I'll wait for the price to drop.