DB/Tag problems with TDT and HManager

[Ced-le-pingouin]

Hi,

After some days of hesitation, I finally upgraded my iHp-140 to the 1.60 firmware (and H-Manager 1.70). After all, even if the features are not half what they should have been (well at least what had been "promised" for a very earlier-scheduled firmware), what harm could it do to my player ?

I think I was wrong though.

1. First thing, I recreated the DB using the new H-Manager. I read on iRiver's website that the DB now supported Unicode, not that I care much, but at least I was less scared when I discovered the DB jumped from 400KB to almost 800KB. It's not really a problem. But... As I turned the player on shortly after, I noticed that some songs were missing from the DB songs list, and some albums were missing too. And at the end of these two lists, some strange entries appeared: the names of the missing songs/albums, but with their complete path on the player, and the end of the line cut. How strange!

So I decided to try the famous TDT everybody's talking about, and all went back to normal, the DB is 400KB, and the strange entries and missing stuff in the songs/albums DB lists did not occur.

So, is this a bug of the firmware, or a bug in the new H-Manager ? I'd vote for the second, not writing the DB correctly in some cases. After some research, I noticed the entries causing problems were songs and/or directories with very long names BUT under 52 characters, since I always check for that, and had no problems with previous firmwares/iRiver software.

2. Now that I've installed TDT and happily uninstalled H-Manager, my DB is created much faster (great!), and only the changes are written subsequent times (even faster! ). BUT... I just saw that AC/DC was now AC in the artists DB list, and all the artists with "w/" etc. had their names cut at the "slash" character. Is this a known issue with TDT ? Am I missing something, or doing something wrong ?

3. Nothing to do with the previous questions, but rather with the new firmware. I'm just wondering how an unpleasant "interference" sound heard when using the remote can be completely gone, only by software modification ? Isn't such a thing a hardware problem ? Does anyone wonder about this too ? I asked myself if they could mess with sound output to achieve this ? In that case, could the sound "improvement" noticed by someone on this forum (but immediately discarded) be true ? I myself found that sound might have slightly changed after the firmware upgrade, maybe more treble, I don't know. Or maybe it's just the production of the new Ministry album I just bought, and I'm listening to all the time ?

Ced

[Richard_Nissen]

Originally Posted by Ced-le-pingouin

Hi,

After some days of hesitation...

3. Nothing to do with the previous questions, but rather with the new firmware. I'm just wondering how an unpleasant "interference" sound heard when using the remote can be completely gone, only by software modification ? Isn't such a thing a hardware problem ?


Ced

In most digital systems interference or noise is a HW as well as a SW problem nowadays. The reason being that if one has a HW design with these problems the only way to work around it is to try modifying the SW. It's bad design practice but often seen, even in costly professional systems.

[Ced-le-pingouin]

Originally Posted by Richard_Nissen

In most digital systems interference or noise is a HW as well as a SW problem nowadays. The reason being that if one has a HW design with these problems the only way to work around it is to try modifying the SW. It's bad design practice but often seen, even in costly professional systems.

Thank you for your answer. I wasn't aware of that. But still, I wonder how you can work around an HW interference by modifying SW, especially when sound is involved.

Do they apply "noise reduction" on the output to make the interference sound disappear ? If they do, they would have to detect whether the remote is plugged or not, so they don't change the sound when it shouldn't be. I'm not a sound programming expert, so maybe I'm talking nonsense here. And it would be a rather bad way to get rid of the problem I suppose (not to mention the noise generated by the interference might be different from one device to another, so using this technique would be unreliable).

Or maybe they have found what was causing the interference, and changed the way they're displaying stuff on the remote ? In that case, they're either really good, or really lucky that they could find another way to do things and work around this HW problem.