Re: New CDJ Version with 270/90ES text uploading

Colby,

Here's my two cents worth of comments on the text uploading.

I performed the upload to a 90ES changer with Slinke version 2.2.

I let CDJ upload all 200 disks and it took about three hours. It loaded the text for all 200 disks and left the changer in Memo Scan mode. All of the disk titles and the track titles for tracks 2 through 16 appeared to load correctly.

There seem to be timing problems after it loads the disk title. The Artist data was always scrambled in one way or another:

1. No Artist data at all
2. If there was any artist data, it was usually in capital letters with the first 1, 2 or 3 characters of some or all of the words being numbers. The artist data for all of my disks is in the following format (for sorting purposes):

"Lastname, Firstname [& Groupname]"

For example, "Eric Burdon & The Animals" would be "Burdon, Eric & The Animals".

I notice that most of the Artist names are one or two words. If the Artist name is more than two words, it's usually truncated to two anyway because of the 13 character limitation. I think the reason for the uppercase letters and the numbers at the beginning of the second word is because of the following scenario:

There seems to be a delay when moving from the Disk Title data field to the Artist data field (possibly caused by "New Artist" being displayed?). At least the first two characters of the Artist upload are lost, possibly leaving the changer in the Uppercase text entry mode. Prior to uploading the second word, a command is sent to toggle the text entry mode twice, but instead of going from Lowercase to Numeric to Uppercase, the changer goes from Uppercase to Lowercase to Numeric. Depending on what the first letter of the second word is, a single
(1, 2, 3, etc.) double (11, 22, 33, etc.) or triple (111, 222, 333, etc.) number will be stored for the first character of the second word. After the first character of the second word, another command is sent to toggle the text entry mode from Uppercase to Lowercase. However, since the text entry mode of the changer is out of sync, the text entry mode instead changes from Uppercase to Numeric.

The changer's text entry mode always seems to be back in sync with the CDJ commands by the second Track Title. The first Track Title is typically scrambled.

I also noticed that every once in a while a word has a letter that is off by one character. For example, a "d" instead of an "e". This could be explained by the changer not seeing both 3's that are transmitted for the "e" character.

Would these apparent timing problems go away it I were to upgrade my Slinke firmware from version 2.2 to 2.3, or are you seeing the same sort of flaky uploads for the artist data?

Also, do you recommend manually clearing out the changer's memory for all disks prior to uploading text? (I don't think it can be done by CDJ; According to the 270/90ES manual, this is accompliched by:

"Turn off the player. While holding down CLEAR, press POWER to turn on the player. ''ALL ERASE'' appears in the front panel display, and all the Custom Files will be erased after a while". )

I thought I would mention the manual memory reset because when I uploaded the 200 discs worth of text data from CDJ, I had some text data left over in the changer from when I was playing around with your test program for uploading text. This data was not completely cleared out by CDJ when it was uploading the text.