Need help with SSA on DMS rebuild for AUDI

[TheRealBatman]

Hi, I am new to this and have been tinkering a few days.  I just bought a Phatnoise that came out of a VW to install in my S4.  I bought it from eBay.  The seller said that the unit was untested but came out of his friends car.  Untested-right.  Well I bought it and sure enough the DMS was wiped.  I'm no expert here but I figured if I could simulate the 1meg partition then the DMS tools would do the rest.  So using win 7 I repartitioned the DMS with a 7meg unnamed unlisted hd, a 788meg PHTSYS and the rest of the 20g is PHTDTA.  Then I ran the DMS tools in repair mode (full).  Which to my smiling face made the car and music manager recognize the dms.  Next was to make the Phatbox and DMS on the same page.  I used DMS tools to create a new DMS using the newest firmware.  I checked the box for not using a hacked firmware and installed acc plug in.  I ran the program in the phat box and am up and running.   There is just one thing.

SSA seams wrong.  When the DMS is in the car and I press 2 the car reads "Now playing playlist." and that is is.  It does not state the name of the playlist.  When I press scan it says Playlist,track,album,artist.  but that is it no info.  so I ran fix tools in Music Manager for SSA under hardware options and it always comes up stream error.  Please help me I am 90% of the way there just need the voice prompting to work.

PS the cart has 4900 songs on it and they all play just no voice prompts.  The deck is set to voice help on and voice is on in hardware in media manager.  I think if I could get the no voice stream error to go away I would be 100%.  I believe the issue may be with the win7 Anna voice but am unsure beyond that.  

Please Help....I'm in the water without a boat.

[VorTechS]

Firstly, congratulations on getting your box up and running... although for future readers I must point out that it was extremely lucky that you seem to have bought a previously hacked box, otherwise what you did to get it working would never have worked!

I'm increasingly finding that people are having problems with SSA, and as yet have not gotten to the bottom of it - RC logs show that the box tries to play the files.

The only advice I can give to you at the moment, is check that the frequency of the files is a valid one... mostly this tends to be either 8khz, 22khz (22050) or 44.1khz.

[Terry_Kennedy]

The only advice I can give to you at the moment, is check that the frequency of the files is a valid one... mostly this tends to be either 8khz, 22khz (22050) or 44.1khz.

That is probably it - the original poster is using Microsoft Anna on Windows 7, which is a 16KHz-only voice.

The first thing to do would be to make sure that the old PhatNoise Music Manager was actually able to create non-corrupt speech files. Do this by connecting the DMS to the PC and browse to the TTS subdirectory of the PHTDATA partition. Look for .wav files in there. Try to play one in Windows. If it plays properly, then you almost certainly have a bit rate problem.

If it is a bit rate problem, read the PhatVoice manual (here) for the steps needed to convert all of the speech files to 22.05KHz.

The problem arises because the PhatBox is not a generalized media player - it is actually quite picky about what file formats it will play. Generally, it wants audio that is encoded at a 44.1KHz (CD) bit rate. 22.05 is easy because it can be doubled. PhatNoise added special compensation for 8KHz because that's what the voice software they were using (an obsolete version of AT&T Natural Voices) generated. There is no support in the box for 16KHz, 48KHz, or other bit rates. This is also true for the other file formats like MP3.