Kenwood's failed attempt at emulating the Keg.

[LloydDobler]

I got a reply from Kenwood support and the response was basically 'everything is fine, it should work just like the Keg, and you need to use PMM to set it up'.

I wrote back saying 'I know it should work that way, I'm writing because it DOES NOT.'

We'll see what I get back.  It happened again today, I was randomly playing music and an artist came on that I wanted to hear the previous album, and I realized that the only way to get to that album was to do a complete new album search (waiting for it to scroll to M, then scrolling through 15 albums that start with M) or just hitting 'previous track' until I found the first track of the album I wanted.  It took 26 presses to find the track I wanted.  So stupid.

I got my new phatbox flashed, hacked and ready to install.  It still burns me up though.

[LloydDobler]

if you have a remote you can type in an number for whatever artist/genere/playlst/album you want depending on mode you are in.. fyi.

Yea, I guess I can get used to that, and it is much better than stock. It would have been nice if they would have just let you use the acdrive functionality on the changer as well though. :-( I have yet to connect a usb drive to it.... perhaps that will work better.

-j

Nope.  On the USB drives all playlist functionality is removed except for 'next' and 'previous'.  You can't search alpha and you can't even type the number in.  If they had left that alone it'd be good enough.

[LloydDobler]

Got another reply from Kenwood tech support and whoever it is (they don't sign a name) says he now understands what I'm saying and he's going to check out the firmware and see if they can add browsing by playlist.  This is promising, that they haven't just blown me off.  It almost makes me regret buying another phatbox.  Almost.

[sbingner]

http://wiki.phathack.com/VIOT explains how to get VIOT or SSA for PhatBoxes on Kenwood headunits

[LloydDobler]

Update:

Last week when I blew up my phatbox I figured it'd be a good idea to hit Kenwood with another email complaining about this and see if they've fixed it.  The guy replied and basically said there are no updates and no plans to update in the future.

Thanks a lot guys for rotten software.  Way to support a $430 product.  Maybe they don't care since they already got my money, but I can certainly make sure they don't get any more of it.

[sbingner]

that sucks -- my reply really looks stupid, did I not read the thread? lol

At least with the phatbox you can have like 160GB of music now

[davec]

Hi All,

I have been hacking the kenwood ACDrive / mCD database and may have some solutions to a few of the shortcomings mentioned in this thread. Please see here for details:

http://wiki.phathack.com/ACDrive

Please start all new Kenwood ACDrive discussions in the new forum here:

http://forum.phathack.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?board=acdrive

Overall, I like the ACDrive, though I have never owned a PhatBox. AFAIK, the kenwood units are still the only decent USB capable headunit, many other brands still have awefull limits (like max 255 files!) and certainly don't have  artist/album/genre/playlist browsing at all.

Thanks,
Dave