Bootcamp/VMware/Parallels and Phatnoise

[ashok77]

Hi everyone!

First let me give everyone a little background. So back in the day I bought a product called Phatbox (now discontinued) which was basically a hard drive mp3 player that integrated with my VW audio system via the cd changer connection. The system works great. The beauty of it was that it created voice prompts for all the albums, artists, songs and playlists using AT&T's natural voices and did all the syncing via a program called Media Manager (a poor but effective version of iTunes). Of course this was all done via my PC (I also had a macbook at the time but since the software was for windows i just used my PC and had my music on the PC)

Fast forward to today and I still have my macbook and now a new 09 Mini, donated the PC to a volunteer group. I have been using a program called PhatMac to transfer all my music to the Phatbox and seems to work okay, not great, just okay. The great thing about PhatMac was that it is Mac program and used the files in iTunes however it was only a work around created by someone for the mac community. It only uses the Mac voices which through the audio system sound pretty crappy and render the system almost unusuable since I need to hear the voices to navigate. I also found it was missing files/albums and the sorting feature didn't seem to work well.

What I would like to do is use either Bootcamp, VMware or Parallels to run the original PC software so that I can use the AT&T voices again. Now for the problem. From what I've been reading if I were to use Bootcamp I won't be able to see all my music on the OSX partition (or any files for that matter) and copy it to the Phatbox hdd. Seems like the only solution I could find was to duplicate my music on the Windows partition and basically keep two copies of my music. This really doesn't appeal to me since I really only wanted to run Windows for this one program and keep the partition to 10gb (I have +50gb of music).

I've started looking into VMware and Parallels and I can't seem to figure out if I use one of them if I'll be able to see my mp3 files through the Phatnoise Media Manager via the virtual pc window.

Does anyone have any insight on either of these programs? Will I be able to use the Phatnoise Media Manager and see all my music in the iTunes folder?

I know this was a little long winded but any help would be appreciated!

Thanks!

 

[MokSiFu]

Personally, I first installed bootcamp so I can have the choice to run OSX or windoze natively, (for better performance in games and some software you see).

After that, I booted into mac, and installed parallels (or fusion if you prefer) and it will automatically detect your bootcamp drive and allow you to run it virtualised on OSX when it's done.

As for the option where you run bootcamp windows (natively) and can't access your OSX partition, there's a program that allows you to actually, it's call MacDrive. (google it if you're interested). But if you use macdrive, I highly suggest you don't use it to write files to any mac formatted drives, rather use read only, because it can potentially corrupt it (like it has done many times to my mac formatted external harddrives in the past which had to be fixed with disk warrior).

Anyway, I hope that clears up your situation.

 

[ashok77]

Great! I'll give it a try.

So just to be sure:

Option 1:
you created a bootcamp volume to run xp if you wanted. And when you install VM or Parallels it uses your bootcamp xp installation? I don't have to reinstall xp again? VM/Parallel will use my existing xp on bootcamp and just virtualize it?

Option 2:
The second option is to just use bootcamp and to run MacDrive? Have you ever used MacDrive?

Thanks for the help and I'll post back with successes or failures

 

[m3kilpat]

I'm pretty sure in parallels or fusion you can set it up so that you can share files across your mac and virtual machine. It's a built in feature so no need to install a separate program and risk data corruption.

 

[SteinMaster]

In VMware Fusion, you can set-up your virtual windows machine to mirror your Mac files. Will be able to mirror your Mac music, photos, documents, etc. to your virtual Windows machine. This may be the route you want to go.

In WMware, you can drag and drop files between your Mac OS and guest operating systems. With the Unity feature of Fusion, you can run Window applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) at the same time as Mac apps. If you do not want to do any WIndows gaming, Fusion virtualization may be the way you want to go. Later, if you want to delete the virtual machine, you simply move the virtual machine file from your documents folder or delete directly in VMware Fusion. Fusion is seamless. So far, I have not had any issues.

 

[SteinMaster]

Oh, forgot to mention. VMware Fusion comes with all drivers so you don't have to worry about installing drivers.

 

[ashok77]

So after looking into Macdrive it seems like there's a little bit of hesitation as some people are finding that their OSX partitions are being corrupted (even though there is a read only option). This concerns me a great deal so I will put Macdrive on the back burner for now.

After doing some more reading I'm thinking about the VMWare route. Now I have heard some people using bootcamp and installing xp and then running VMware vs. just using VMware from the get go. Is there any advantage to either method? Will VMware use the bootcamp xp version or will I effectively have two copies of xp on the go?

My other concern is with VMware do I run the risk of corrupting any of my mac files? Is there a read only option?

Thanks.