# Phatbox vs. Icelink



## abracc (Apr 15, 2006)

I actually emailed him on ebay and worked something out with him. So I should be in possesion by the beginning of next week...hopefully..  Thanks for the tip!!


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## niter (Jan 11, 2006)

abracc said:


> I actually emailed him on ebay and worked something out with him. So I should be in possesion by the beginning of next week...hopefully..  Thanks for the tip!!


No problem mate....

Congrats on the purchase....:thumbup:


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## abracc (Apr 15, 2006)

Installed the Phatbox this week...sounds wonderful and was very simple to install. Playing around with the playlist feature since I kind of just like to listen to just random of everything...but I think I figured it out. Now, is it my imagination, but does the music sound even cleaner/better than it does via cd? Thanks again for everyone's opinions and help.


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## Andre Yew (Jan 3, 2002)

Terry Kennedy said:


> . Also, with the PhatBox, I have true gapless MP3 playback (not cross-fading). I don't think the iPod offers this.


My 4th gen iPod definitely does not offer this, and in fact the gaps between tracks is highly variable. But how did you get your Phatbox to do gapless? I can still hear gaps or clicks between tracks on mine.

--Andre


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## abracc (Apr 15, 2006)

Hmmmm...I've not noticed any significant gaps or any clicking with my phatbox.


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## Terry Kennedy (Sep 21, 2002)

Andre Yew said:


> My 4th gen iPod definitely does not offer this, and in fact the gaps between tracks is highly variable. But how did you get your Phatbox to do gapless? I can still hear gaps or clicks between tracks on mine.


Since MP3's are built as frames of 1 second each, there may be up to 1 second between tracks. The normal hack to deal with this is called cross-fading, where one track fades out while the next fades in, but that still has unacceptable (IMHO) limitations.

If you generate one huge MP3 file for a whole CD (you'll need to use constant bitrate as VBR will throw off the track skip functionality), you can use the method described at: http://phatbox.sixpak.org/phatbox/unsupported.phtml to create a M3U file which lists the offsets within the MP3 file.


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## Andre Yew (Jan 3, 2002)

Thanks Terry! That's a really useful site, and the .m3u thing is exactly what I'm looking for.

--Andre


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## Terry Kennedy (Sep 21, 2002)

Andre Yew said:


> Thanks Terry! That's a really useful site, and the .m3u thing is exactly what I'm looking for.


The information there isn't actually wrong, just incomplete (the person who hosts that page is/was a PhatNoise employee, but got the info second-hand from the person who actually did the code).

Offhand, here is what I remember:

-1 for the end of disc may not work (depends on firmware version)
you need to create the .pbx files as well
files need to be CBR, not VBR (already mentioned)
You need to mount the DMS, start PMM, copy the .mp3/.m3u/.pbx files over, and do a save-and-eject from PMM to sign the playlists and build the index files

I have some Unix-ish Perl scripts which work with my media collection (http://www.tmk.com/media/searcher) to build the files. If they're of interest, I can post them.


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## Andre Yew (Jan 3, 2002)

Thanks Terry. I found a couple of your posts on the old Phatnoise forum through Google's cache, and saw many of those issues (as well as the Perl script) mentioned.

--Andre


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