What should this forum do now?

[admin]

We've done it.  It's hacked.  It's pretty simple to do now (though there are a few difficulties still being worked out.)  So what do we do now?

I want to see Phat4X become a far better option than PMM.  I want phatvoice and phatsort to be somehow integrated (in Phat4x?) so that people can have any kind of voice prompt (of the highest quality) as simply as snyching their DMS.

What do you want to see?

[S80_UK]

Hi Paul,

Well, here's my two cents...

The forum has also done a good job of encouraging people to connect boxes for, say, a VW, to a different vehicle / head unit.  When people change cars every 2 or 3 years this is a real benefit.  Of course, it may not be what Phatnoise or the vehicle brands want us to do - I am sure they would rather we buy a new box.  And of course with the relatively cheap VW boxes that are available, someone may be losing out somewhere.  But my view is that those if us that hack these things are the smalll minority of users, who then go out and evangelise about the product.  The efect could very well be that more "official" PB installations then get sold.

I have just about finished hooking a VW box up to my Volvo S80.  I will be happy to post some more details of the wiring etc when I'm done.

Regards,

Les.

[judb]

not make people reply to threads under penalty of account deletion?

I want to see some mods come out to replace phatnoise software with better features.. (like a way to mark songs for deletion and phat4x being able to delete them, or some other tool perhaps.)

I want to see detailed hacks on the hardware side for adding larger drives, multiple drives, digital output, serial port / infrared or something.  Let's make this thing really do whatever we can.  Hell, maybe we can come up with a Navi mod for it>?

[A543]

Serial port would be awesome, from there the box could go Bluetooth so it could be controlled via PDA and/or music could be added remotely. FLAC tag support. Nested SSA modes. Cup holder attachment.

[judb]

Serial port would be awesome, from there the box could go Bluetooth so it could be controlled via PDA and/or music could be added remotely. FLAC tag support. Nested SSA modes. Cup holder attachment.

someone really should pressure phatnoise about releasing the code they built for ALL the opensource tools they have.  FLAC / Busybox / linux (we have this one already) / mp3 codec if they are not using the closed source fraunhaufer version etc...  might be useful

as for FLAC tag support, its not the phatbox that is the issue as the phatd / audio player executables don't read the tags.. PMM does.  so phat4x could solve that issue.  the flac decoder might not properly handle files with vorbis style tags in them which then we'd need the source to apply a fix.

[sbingner]

I've submitted a request for a new project on SourceForge called PhatOS - there we can make a full replacement for the current software.... if we get into it properly we should be able to have some really cool features...

[sbingner]

Hi Paul,

Well, here's my two cents...

The forum has also done a good job of encouraging people to connect boxes for, say, a VW, to a different vehicle / head unit.  When people change cars every 2 or 3 years this is a real benefit.  Of course, it may not be what Phatnoise or the vehicle brands want us to do - I am sure they would rather we buy a new box.  And of course with the relatively cheap VW boxes that are available, someone may be losing out somewhere.  But my view is that those if us that hack these things are the smalll minority of users, who then go out and evangelise about the product.  The efect could very well be that more "official" PB installations then get sold.

I have just about finished hooking a VW box up to my Volvo S80.  I will be happy to post some more details of the wiring etc when I'm done.

Regards,

Les.

Make a HOWTO on the Wiki

[az1324]

I definitely agree with the any type of voice prompt idea.

Also, I'd like to see hardware accessories such as displays and remotes.

[judb]

I definitely agree with the any type of voice prompt idea.

Also, I'd like to see hardware accessories such as displays and remotes.

The SOC (System On a Chip) that phatnoise uses has pins for a video frame buffer but it does not have them connected anywhere if I recall correctly so we would have to do some form of physical hacking (like building a pogo pin board that gave you a VGA connector output... I don't think theres an intergrated RAMDAC though so we'd need to add one of those perhaps.. it gets quite complicated fast.. if you dont go pogopin you have to pull out a soldering iron.

[timps]

I agree with S80_UK about different head units just about to change from an Audi concert II to a Kenwood would be nice to know if I had other options  with a different manufacturer.

Voice tags on a VW box using a different head unit would also  be nice from my  understanding  I don't think I can even buy it for a modified VW box it has to be a keg

[todd1010]

Ohh, scarey! I better respond.  

Anyways, I would really like to see Phatvoice intregrated with it being able to resample the 16k voices without having to run a different program.

We could try and have a master .subs list with each different 16k voice. Because Crystal may have a different subs file for a word and Audrey may need it done a little different. I'm only thinking we should/could do this for more "general" mispronounciations. (MAYBE ITS DO-ABLE)

Being able to "show duplicate songs" like Itunes is nice.

Printing your artists database, and track titles to a file. I'm thinking that these would need to be able to be done separate. So it could assist you in making a .subs file.

More CD Burners detected!

Add CD Text from the Phatbox to the Audi RNS-E head unit. (WOULD LOVE THAT!)

I guess a lot of people would like nested folders!

Handle "various artist" better.

[todd1010]

We've done it.  It's hacked.  It's pretty simple to do now (though there are a few difficulties still being worked out.)  So what do we do now?

I want to see Phat4X become a far better option than PMM.  I want phatvoice and phatsort to be somehow integrated (in Phat4x?) so that people can have any kind of voice prompt (of the highest quality) as simply as snyching their DMS.

What do you want to see?

What do you mean its hacked? Do this mean that we will start being able to use Phat4X soon? I mean I've tried getting all of the other components together to try it but I couldn't find everything or it was down.

[Firefox]

Enable the audioid lines in phatbox.ini for Kenwood units so that on demand voice announcements would work like on all other Phatboxes.
Need to agree a button on the Kenwood headunit that would trigger the announcement.

[ericthebikeman]

I'd like software that properly supports x64 windows without the need to hack the msi files. Also the ability to create rules for the media library not just playlists would be nice. Honestly why the hell do you need to copy the whole library if the playlist rules say don't copy it.

[Xyplexor]

I too am new to this forum and I'm not sure I have any recommendations for the forum.

I've got a VW Phatbox that I want to convert to use with a Kenwood HU that I don't yet have. But I suspect that this info is somewhere in the Wiki.

I also want to put a bigger drive into my DMS... but that's also here somewhere.

And since I don't have any new ideas should I leave?  

There's got to be a better way to browse thru all my playlists. Some way to skip ahead 10 at a time or something. Is this a VW limitation? Is it better in Kenwood.

[judb]

Yes those questions are answerd.  Use the search feature and set it to be like a 365 day search window to find your answers.

As for the kenwood, you can use a remote and type in play list numbers to jump around quickly which is handy. but in general its not that much better.  I do my playlists as letters of the alphabet and then navigate by artist after getting to the right letter.. much quicker that way I think.

[Rude Man]

Well I just joined up about 15 minutes ago and right now I am getting overwhelmed with some of the info here.
But I do know I want to add a much larger drive in my unit. Right now the standard 20GB. I have the VW Phatbox.
One question I do have though.
Is there a difference whether you get a 4200 rpm or can I get a  5400 RPM drive and will it work?
Thx

[ExLifeguard]

The ability to mix by genre would be nice

[Terry_Kennedy]

I'm interested in LBA48 support so we'll be able to use drives larger than 128GB when they become available. I think we have all the pieces necessary to rebuild the PhatBox Linux kernel, so it should just be a matter of applying LBA48 patches to the IDE driver.

[Oaf]

Add new codecs to the Phatbox!!

I had some successs with Apple Lossless but never had the time to follow it up to completion (it was decoding via a script at startup, then I got a new contract and have had to spend time doing "real work" ever since!)   Oh well.

Shame that Phatnoise don't release a SDK or similar, even a few basic docs would help. A lot of player routines are open source so it wouldn't take much to tweak/compile them, it's the "integration" part that I'm less sure of...

It would be nice to see a good solution to albums with "various artists" too...