Tags not picked up by DMS

[Irish Eyes]

Getting a weird problem since I hacked my DMS and put in a 80GB drive.  SOngs transfer ok, but some are not picked up by the voice tagging.  For example one album (Peter Green, if anyone remembers him...) on a playlist/disk, which when I browse by playlist plays ok, but of I browse by album or artist it is not picked up.  If when playing a track on this album I go to browse by artist or album it reverts to the first one by alphabetical order.  It does this on others as well...

I have tried rebuilding the database, reloaded the DMS several times, rebuilt the voice tags but to no avail.

Has anyone else had this problem?  Anyone know what's happening?!

Thanks

Pete

[sbingner]

Perhaps it's just not where you expected it to be?  Or could the artist tag be empty?

[Irish Eyes]

Tags are there, they show up on PMM, but they don't get picked up by the DMS.

This has only been a problem since I hacked the DMS and installed a 80GB drive.  Curiously all the music I had on the old 20GB drive works flawlessly, it's just stuff I've added since the hack.

Bewildered...

[VorTechS]

When you say it's not being picked up by the DMS, do you really mean not being displayed on the Head Unit?

[Irish Eyes]

I have an Audi Concert 2 which does not display DMS info.  I mean there are no voice prompts for these albums/artists.  I created a playlist called "Peter Green" into which I dropped about 20 PG tracks.  This playlist plays back dine on the DMS, and the voice prompt for the playlist is also ok.  But while playing back one of these tracks if I go to browse by artist or album I get a completely random result, although more commonly it defaults to the first artist, 10,000 Maniacs.

Wierd I know...

[VorTechS]

From what I recall of writing code to write the DMS databases, this doesn't surprise me and is an oversight in the whole design of the SSA structure.  Essentially the databases for each is designed to cope with album/artists using an A-Z approach, I did question PhatNoise about it while I was writing my functions (because I could see it as being a hole), and I think they turned round and said that it wouldn't be a problem.  IIRC they mentioned that all non-alpha matches would be at the start of the database, not that I understood how they could be.

I never actually tried it out myself, but I guess you are confirming my suspicions....I don't think it can cope with non-alpha prefixes in the various categories.  The best bet would be to switch the numeric prefixes to their alpha equivalents, ie '10,000' to 'Ten Thousand' in the tags.

In PhatHack Media Manager, I've specifically coded the application to use the track info. which can be stored in the PBX files to generate the databases, which means you can modify the playlist tags to achieve this, without affecting the media tags.  It's an oversight more than anything else, because I haven't yet written anything to write the tags back to the media files unless you are transcoding.

[Irish Eyes]

Thanks VorTech.  The alpha-numeric tags are not an issue for me, 10,000 Maniacs gets picked up fine.  Guess it doesn't like my choice of old British Blues Icons (Peter Green)!

[Irish Eyes]

UPDATE:

Just pulled the DMS and looked at it in XP.  Curiously, the offending tracks are in a separate directory to everything else.  Most of my music is under Users\myname\iTunes Music\Artist\Album, but these are all on f:\myname on my Pc\music\itunes\itunes music\artist etc.

Must be something around the way PMM adds new tracks, or maybe the way I am doing it (although I don't think I am doing anything strange)

I'll play around a bit more...

[markbowen]

PMM copies tracks to the DMS as a mirror of whatever the source directory is.  If you've got them under different directories on your PC, it will create different directories on your DMS -- and that could account for the wonky behavior you are experiencing.  I think I experienced something similar when I first got into these things.

Now, I keep all music on my computer under a single directory (root:\music\artist\album) and it goes to the DMS the same way.  I've got no problems with SSA on a hacked 160GB DMS (which includes numerous British blues icons...)

If repairing the database and recreating the voice prompts hasn't worked so far, I would suggest wiping all the music from the DMS, making sure to delete the relevant directories on the DMS as well, then consolidating all your music in a single directory on your PC before transferring.

[VorTechS]

The location of the files shouldn't make a jot of difference.  I found that PMM didn't recreate voice prompts for some files I transferred too, and they were in a consolidated directory.

PhatHack Media Manager can re-generate the voice prompts using the text file generated in the TTS directory, and this DOES mirror the full TTS announcements that should have been generated by PMM.

[Irish Eyes]

UPDATE #2

Wiped the DMS, reloaded all music, directory structure now much simpler.  And at last a voice tag for poor Peter Green!

But...  When I am playing a Peter Green track (or any other track I acquired around the same time) and go to browse by artist or album it does not start with the currently playing artist, but jumps to another random artist.

I am beginning to suspect the files themselves, there seems to be a common problem with them.  The tags look ok looking at them in iTunes, PMM and XP but they are ID3 v2.2 according to iTunes, and most of my other music is ID3v2.3 .  Could this be a reason?  I thought PMM supported ID3v2.2?

Thanks y'all

[markbowen]

You can try re-tagging the files in PMM, to be sure.  The tags will still be read by iTunes.

I use Tag & Rename for tagging, great program for cleaning up lots of tags.

[Irish Eyes]

UPDATE #3...

Ok, I wiped the DMS, retagged all my music as ID3 v2.3, and loaded up the DMS once again.  All tracks now have voice-prompts, and they correspond to the correct tracks.  So, PMM seems to be doing its job.

But the browsing problem remains.  If I am playing a particular track, and go to "now browsing by artist" the DMS jumps to a different, random track.  It seems that it does not remember the track it is playing and jumps to anything it can find.

Anybody got any ideas, 'cos I am stumped!

[VorTechS]

Does the same happen when you have the a track playing based on an artist in the A-Z range?

[Irish Eyes]

It happens to any artist, any album.  Strange.

[VorTechS]

It's going to end up being an issue with the DMS/VIOT databases.  Because it works on an A-Z premise, my guess is that the offsets in the track listing database are incorrect.  And that's not easy to fix

[Irish Eyes]

I have tried to rebuild the database using PMM, but this does not seem to cure it, although I guess this is the info the player uses.

What if I kill power to it totally?

[VorTechS]

No rebuilding won't help.  The issue is the design of the VIOT databases and not the content of them per se.

Switch the numerics to the alpha equivalent and I bet the problem goes away.

[Irish Eyes]

Its not just artists beginning with numeric characters, it is all artists, regardless of whether they begin with a number (eg 10,000 Maniacs) or a letter (eg Fleetwood Mac).  It worked fine before I hacked the box and put in a larger disk.

That's why it has me baffled!

[sbingner]

That is very strange, it works fine for me on my 160GB drive.

You loaded your music with Phatnoise Media Manager?