New Phatbox Owner. How do I organise 30 gigs of music for quick access??

[calibos]

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.

[SteveC]

The number 1 thing you HAVE to do is clean up your tags. There's no "getting around" it, you absolutely must get your tags cleaned up.

[S80_UK]

The number 1 thing you HAVE to do is clean up your tags. There's no "getting around" it, you absolutely must get your tags cleaned up.

I agree - but PhatNoise Media Manager is good for this when you need to fix those mis-spellings of artists.  Create a dummy playlist.  Drop all the albums / tracks etc that you can find that you want to be the same into that playlist.  Then select all the tracks at once.  Right-click the tracks and Edit File Tag.  Then change ONLY the tag for the artist.  Apply the change.  The other tags will not be modified.  Then delete all the tracks from the playlist (say No to delete from hard disk). 

This allows a mass edit of tags across multiple tracks in multiple albums in multiple folders.  It will contribute the tracks to the Phatnoise Media Manager database, but you can again go and select a bunch of entries and delete them to avoid this clutter (again - do not allow delete from hard disk).  It is actually quicker and easier to do this than to describe it here.  I use it frequently.

The other thing you can do, if you are used to navigating folders, is simply to create a few play lists, one for each of the folders that you want, and then just drop the tracks in from each folder.  Rename the playlist to your choice of name.  This will not require you to edit tags if you don't want to.

I see from your original post that you were expected nested searching - unfortunately the Phatbox does not provide that mechanism in the manner that you describe.

And why do some of have huge hard discs? - 1) because we can!  - 2) because many of us use codecs like FLAC which only compress the CD by about 2:1, so a 160GB drive will typically hold around 400 to 450 CDs.

Everyone has their own way of finding things.  I use mainly playlists (which I keep in alphabetical order of artist for the most part), but I also use artist search.  On my head unit, if I hold down the previous or next buttons in artist search mode, the Phatbox calls out A, B, C as letters and only for the letters where there is an artist.  Then once I get to, say, P, I take my finger off, and step through the P's one at a time until I get to Pink Floyd.  Then I switch to Album, since the albums are pre-sorted to be grouped by artist (I think - I do it so automatically now that it's hard to be sure exactly from memory - and it's freezing outside right now, but I'm pretty sure that's what happens).

Best thing - experiment to see what works for you.

Good luck!

[todd1010]

I couldn't agree more with Steve. When I first got my Audi Phatbox I already had around 20gb's of mp3's. Well before I had the Phatbox I didn't really care what ID tags did or I didn't even know about them. So after putting all of those mp3's on the DMS I couldn't find a damn thing. Because your Audi head unit won't display text from the CD changer/Phatbox so you MUST rely on the ID tags for ease of use.

I use and continue to use Tag & Rename because of the big mess I had. If you don't have such a mess then you can use the one built into Media Manager.

Once you have them tagged the way you like. Then when go to put them on the DMS just start out with a playlist for each artist and put all of their albums on that playlist. It may not be perfect but it's a start and you'll soon find a better way that fits your style of browsing.

One more is since you have an Audi and as long as you have the stock head unit there was another member here that made a custom phatbox.ini which actually works really well with the stock Audi head unit. What it does is gives you a little more time to make changes or find what your looking for without reverting back to soon to the music. I find it and post what you need to do.

Another thing to do is if you find this website helpful then please donate some money towards upkeep.

[beckfield]

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?

Thought I'd answer this one piece:  Check out a program called PhatVoice. http://www.tmk.com/PhatVoice/index.shtml

This was written by one of the guys here, and can be used (with some expertise) to modify how the TTS engine renders things like punctuation, pronunciation, and numbers.

[SteveC]

Thought I'd answer this one piece:  Check out a program called PhatVoice. http://www.tmk.com/PhatVoice/index.shtml

This was written by one of the guys here, and can be used (with some expertise) to modify how the TTS engine renders things like punctuation, pronunciation, and numbers.

Also, the newest Phatnoise Media Manager versions have TTS hinting as well, buried in the options. You can use it to help correct pronunciation.

[wilson]

Hello Calibos,
I had a similar issue where i had a folder structure built on CD rips i started in the 90's.  Normalizing the tags was the first seemingly daunting project, but if your structure is similar to mine, it shouldn't be that bad.

My library is sorted A/Artist/Album/Song - so i was able to use tag editors to script Artist, Album and Genere normalization quite quickly.  I'm using Debian Linux, for which there were free options in the repository. Since you're ripping WMA, I'll assume you use windows, but you should be able to find something similar.   

If you try to script something, i do recommend you make a backup, incase you goof :)