A startup sound can be placed in phatbox.ini or profiles.ini. Just put in startup_sound=/dos/path/to/sound.mp3. A value in phatbox.ini will take precedence over one in profiles.ini (put it under the right profile). It will play as soon as the PhatBox first gets a command to play. New: instead of a path, you can use rand:/dos/data/directory/, and a random file will be picked from that directory.
In each .pbx file, you can add mag_random=off to prevent that playlist from being included in magazine random. To enable this, you may need check_mag_random=on to the playlist's profile's section in profiles.ini (older firmware only).
To start the box in random, put random=disc or random=all in phatbox.ini. This may cause screwy behavior on the head unit.
swap_channels=on in phatbox.ini will swap the left and right audio outputs.
Putting force_random=on in the .pbx file for a playlist will automatically put the unit in random mode when that list is started. This must be enabled with check_force_random=on in the playlists's profiles's section of Profiles.ini. The change into random mode will not be reflected on the head unit.
The "playlist resume" feature is enabled by putting bookmark=on in the playlist's .pbx file. The PMM will retain this setting if the corresponding .bmk file (p#.bmk) is present. You can create one by making an 8 byte file, all zeros, or by switching to that playlist in the PhatBox before re-docking the cartridge.
The .m3u files can now handle multiple tracks from one file. Just put a
tab, start time (seconds), tab, end time (seconds) after the path to mark
where it starts and ends in the file. -1 can be used to signify the end
of the file. For non-audible files, the sections must be consecutive and
run up to the end of the file. Here's an example:
#First Track /dos/data/file.mp3 0 60 #Second Track /dos/data/file.mp3 61 120 #Third Track /dos/data/file.mp3 121 -1
The time spent inbetween letters in alphabet seek is configured with sleeptime=300000 in phatbox.ini. The number is how long to wait in microseconds (usleep()), between letters.
Removing or commenting out bad_album_db=on will cause the album list to be sorted by album title first intead of artist then album title. To enable letter seeking, add album_seek=alpha to the current profile in Profiles.ini. With newer index files, you must create your own indexes with custom sorting. See the Linux scripts for examples.
list_title_text controls what will be displayed for the "list" (playlist/artist/album/genre) title. It can be any string. %t, %M, %m, and %n will be expanded to title, mode (long name), mode (short name), and list number, respectively.
ssa_track_text configure the track text display in the "SSA" modes. It's similar to list_title_text, where %a=artist, %l=album, %g=genre, %t=title, %T=track number (in album), %f=filename, %p=first playlist the track is in.
Anything set to "on", can also be set to 1 (or any non-zero number). The Windows software may prefer certain values to be set this way.