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Is it worth reviving the PhatHack Forums?

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Terry_Kennedy:
It has been a long time since anyone posted on these forums.

I'm trying to see if there are some lurkers still around who have an interest in using these forums to discuss the Phatnoise PhatBox / Kenwood Music Keg and possibly expand into other types of unusual non-factory audio systems.

Terry_Kennedy:
In my case (and the reason I came here) is that I have been running a PhatBox in my 2003 BMW since the car was new. The PhatBox has been hacked and I've been using a 320GB WD Blue hard drive in the DMS. For the last few years (8, actually, according to the date of the newest MP3 file in the DMS) the whole thing has been in a state of benign neglect (AKA "it just works").

But I've gone through a number of different Windows versions (I'm now on Windows 10 LTSC 2019) and I was faced with needing to reinstall all of the various bits I use to populate a DMS. I'll spare you the gory details of how I populate the DMS, but I will say that I use:

* PhatHack (to prepare the DMS)
* AT&T Natural Voices (text to speech engines for PhatVoice)
* PhatVoice (to actually generate the album / artist name speech)
* PhatNoise Music Manager 2.35 (to sign the playlists and update the database index)I decided I was going to experiment with a mSATA SSD in an IDE adapter, because that poor WD Blue has been on some terrible roads, as well as drives across open desert and up mountains where there are no roads.

I first tried a simple copy of my 320GB DMS data to a mSATA SSD, but that has been showing some problems - appearing to work well at the beginning and then just speaking text at random. So I'm going to have to backtrack and see if I can create a traditional IDE DMS. If that works, I'll get back to the SSD experiments. This does involve my whole music chain from CD image bin + cue files to TOC files and MP3 files, and then writing them out to the DMS for PMM to sign and build the database. Part of the problem there is that a lot of my local procedures are written in Perl and don't work under modern FreeBSD + Perl.

4driver4:
I'm just finding this forum now.  I'm a long time user of Phatty and I've dusted off a few old boxes for some of my older cars. 
I don't think this forum needs to push the envelope, but it's hard to find solid support for these things.

Terry_Kennedy:
Ok. I'm still here occasionally and I assume some of the other old timers are too - somebody is paying the bills to keep the lights on.

An update on my experiments - I'm using a different mSATA SSD and a different mSATA to IDE adapter and it has been running in my car successfully for a few months now. I still don't have the complete FreeBSD side of my music tools running, but there's enough working to build a DMS.

VorTechS:
I still have my Phatbox and stereo, and possibly an Audi version too lying around, so I'm happy to put some effort into some new tools (probably geared around Windows).
Perhaps we can GitHub something?

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