Hi, I just bought my brothers Audi A3 that has a Phatbox installed. He never really got to grips with it himself and I suppose he never really had to because his music collection was small and his tastes limited. He just created Playlists that corresponded exactly with an Album. He did this for the 20 or so albums he put on the phatbox. ie He hasn't been able to be much help to me in loading up my music onto the phatbox
I however have I much larger music collection and much more varied tastes! Therein lies the crux of the matter! First off I have about 33 gigs of music on the home PC. It was painfull culling it down to fit on my 20 gig DMS. Absolutely thrilled to come across this forum while looking for the "Now Closed" Phatnoise forums. I'll be ordering an 80-100 gig replacement drive and hacking my phatbox ASAP!!
Thanks Phathack members!! I'll now be able to re-instate that other 13gig I culled.
99.9% of my music was ripped from CD in WMA format. Has the newer firmware (that I'll be installing in due course) fixed the wma bug I've read about...and heard myself during testing! ie little squeeks and chirps during song playback?
Next question concerns tagging. I found out while loading my Creative Zen up with music that different tagging schemes could really screw thinkgs up. ie different spellings and punctuation of a single band across multiple albums would have the player listing multiple artist entries for the same artist. Genre info was often screwed up too. I got around this to some extent on the Zen because I was able to maintain folder structure so I new where to look for the music. I new this would be a problem on the phatbox though so set about over a number of days in homogenising (sp?) the artist and genre info. Imagine my horror during testing yesterday to find that the Voice software reads out years as numbers and reads out punctuation, "open bracket-close bracket" etc. Do I have to redo the tags on my whole collection again or is there some setting in the PMM software that I can set to make the voice software ignore punctuation and read numbers as years?
Next question regards playlists. Like I said I haven't really had to use these before because my other MP3/WMA mass storage devices could maintain and let me browse my folder structure that I was used to.
With the phatbox what I did was because of the 10 genre etc limitation in setting up dynamic playlists, I had to main playlists with 10 genres in each. My first playlist was called 'Rock' which contained 10 different Rock Genres. My second playlist was called 'Other Genres' and contained all the other musical Genres. I was under the assumsumption that I could get to a particular album like this:
In playlist mode select 'Rock' playlist.
Then switch to Genre mode and select 'Punk Rock' for example.
Then switch to Album mode and select the Punk Rock album I wanted.
Unless I am imagining things when I switch mode the new mode is not acting on the previous selection but on the whole contents of the DMS. Using the above example. When I switch from Rock playlist to Genre mode I expect to be just cycling through the 10 rock genres within that playlist. Instead I also hear all the genres within the 'Other Genres' playlist too. Not a biggie till I get down to album mode. I want to just be cycling through albums within the punk genre using my example. Instead once I switch to album mode I start hearing Rap-HipHop albums called out etc They are in a whole other playlist!!
I know most of you guys have infinitely larger music collections than I (Half of you want 160gig+drives!!!) so there must be something I am missing or misunderstanding about playlists and how to set them up. Surely with a 'mere' 30 gig collection it shouldn't take 10 minutes before setting off on a journey to cycle cycle cycle through album after album to get to the music I want.
If I have misunderstood how playlists in general or the phatbox in particular works, can someone please tell me how people organise there music to get to a particular album quickly and efficiently with the minimum of button presses.
I hope someone can answer my questions and many thanks in advance.