Hey everyone,
Glad to see this message aboard is still alive and kicking.
Not sure where I should begin but here it goes…
I’ve had my PhatBox for over 5 yrs and have loved it. I did the hack and have a 100gb DMS now that has been working perfectly. I was a PC user and used PMM to transfer all my music over. Other then a few issues it worked well enough. I’ve since cleaned out all the PC’s and am purely a Mac household now. I was delighted to find PhatMac and it seems to do the trick however my issue now is that for some reason I’m suddenly missing a bunch of albums and the phatbox is operating a little strange.
This is a little long winded but here it what is going on and what I have done so far.
So to begin I’ll explain how I found out I was having issues. With the change over to PhatMac I decided to reload the DMS with all my music as it had been a long time since I updated it. I cleared out all the old songs and after reading the manual again I came across this “The PhatBox can handle as many as 9999 separate Disc numbers, with up to 9999 songs per Disc number. The total number of songs on the DMS Cartridge must not exceed 30,000.” I decided to create 3 playlists with 6,000 songs in one disc/playlist, 4,449 in the next and one playlist with just my top fifty. So far so good, PhatMac loaded all the speech files (including track names) and all the songs.
When I got in the car and skipped to Kanye it started to play the first song/intro from College Dropout. When I push 3 to have the voice prompt tell me the album, the PhatBox pauses and then tells me the album is the first artists’ album (Sing the Sorrow by AFI) and starts playing the first AFI song. The next thing I tried was going back to the artist Kanye and tried switching albums. When I do this the next album that the PhatBox announces is the next artists album, not another Kanye album but when I go back it does tell me 808’s but College Dropout doesn’t come up at all even though that is the first song that get’s played when I got to Kanye via the artist search.
Now for what I’ve done.
I have removed the songs from itunes, re-encoded them (to meet the phatbox specs) and added them back to itunes as part of my troubleshooting. The next thing I did was clear all the songs and just added this one particular artist (kanye west) and the 5 albums to see if there was anything specific about the albums that caused the issue. This worked fine, I was able to navigate all the albums easily.
Next I removed all the discs/playlists and created just one with 9,999 songs (which included all the Kanye albums). Tried this and get the original issue.
Oh and originally when I was using PMM all the albums were there (total song count would have been just under 9,999).
With the SnowLeopard update I’ve had to get an external enclosure to update the drive so I have to remove the drive each time to update so I’m trying not reattach the drive to many times.
Is this a PhatMac issue? Is there something simple I am missing? Songs are encoded properly and show up when they are the only albums but when I add Phatbox seems to lose them. From what I can tell it's only these albums.
Thoughts?
Thanks in advance!