CUSTOM POI (all I see is a dot)

Excellent.

@Rth,
That's what this site is all about. No, not beating your head against the wall! It only reads like that.

@All,
(side track) Missed a day on this thread and now recovering from the day at the airport yesterday helping the wheelchair veterans coming to town. I was a strapper securing all the wheel chairs on 22 buses converted for wheelchair use traveling back and forth to downtown. I went for about 10 hours straight crawling all around, over and under getting them safely secured for the ride. Hot tired and filthy dirty, I was done. Our wheel chair heros were all very appreciative of all the volunteers welcoming, helping and entertaining them. I'm tired and sore but it was a great day, and the games started today. (/side track)

Okay, it seems to me that SoX 14.3.2 could not have ever worked for anyone if the syntax is different from 14.0.1 unless POILoader can tell which version is present in its folder.

Now that I know more than I ever wanted to about SoX, isn't it possible to get the syntax printout from each version and with that in hand, guess that any version that doesn't match v14.0.1 will probably not work.

Unless we can determine that POILoader can send the different syntax for each version of SoX I'm sticking with v14.0.1.

Any way, great work Evert and CraigW.

There is, as you said, some guess work in doing it that way, and also we do not know exactly which of the other possible switches that POILoader uses in the command line.

The easiest and most sure way to check if any of the other versions work would be to delete the current temp.wav file and then run PoiLoader along with each version of sox.

One could simply leave open the folder where temp.wav is stored and watch to see if the file is re-created after each run.

But I don’t think it is necessary to do so because I agree with the others that the thing to do is to use POILoader 2.6.1 and sox.exe 14.0.1 for now .

However I have all the versions of sox on my computer, and with some batch files I already have, I could test all of them fairly quickly and may do so just because they are there.

When Garmin comes out with the next version of POILoader I intend to test it against the newer sox versions and see if they work together.

Just for fun I ran a test for all sox.exe versions available since 14.0.1

Computer: 32 bit Windows XP SP3
POILoader: version 2.6.1
Sox versions tested: 14.0.1 14.1.0, 14.2.0, 14.3.0, 14.3.1, 14.3.2

Only sox 14.0.1 created a C:\%homepath%\Local Settings\Temp\POILoader\temp.wav file.

I noticed that all versions create a file named similar to “poi17.tmp” in the C:\%homepath%\Local Settings\Temp\POILoader folder. You have to have the folder open while running POILoader to see it because it is automatically erased when the ‘Finish” button is selected.

The temp.wav file created by sox 14.0.1 remained after POILoader finished, so I manually deleted it before doing the remaining tests.

I opened the poi17.tmp file created during one of the runs, using a Hex editor and can see that it contains only waypoint data, nothing about sound file.

So apparently if only poixx.tmp is created (and not temp.wav) during a POILoader session, the result will be just a custom poi with no sound alert. And as mentioned, only sox 14.0.1 creates the temp.wav file.

BTW dll files of various names and amounts come with version 14.2.0 and later. I copied all the related dlls along with sox.exe to the POILoader program folder for each version test. And I always deleted any dll files used during a preceeding test.

Thanks for the update. Sure clears things up.

To me, every day is Veterans Day. I sing with another fellow at Assisted living, Nursing Homes, Alzheimer's units, etc and we always take the time to point out that "Freedom is not free; a vet paid for it." All of the vets paid some; some of those vets paid all.

Thanks for helping those wheel chair heroes.

God bless.

I love it Evert. "Just for the fun of it" but a test that needed to be done to prove the fact that 14.0.1 is the only one for us. And done by the right guy too! Fantastic job, thanks for all that work!!!

Your welcome.

You are welcome and thank you for your kind words.

Tinkering with computers has long been a source of fun for me.

Back when a large hard drive was 10 MB, I used DOS debug to disassemble a dot sys driver file and reprogrammed, it using assembly language, to use some of the extra memory on a Hercules graphics card as an emulated hard drive.

That only added a small drive but it was fun for me and I learned a lot about how hard drives are formatted and how the master boot record is (was) configured.

Nowadays, that kind of tedious work is not so much fun, but I still enjoy doing easier things such as the tests I did in this thread.

BTW There is an error in the file path I posted.

The path should have been:
C:%homepath%\Local Settings\Temp\POILoader\temp.wav file

instead of:

C:\%homepath%\Local Settings\Temp\POILoader\temp.wav file

The backslash after C: will cause the path to have two backslashes because the system variable %homepath% already has one in it. That will cause the system to think the path is on a network.

For those who get headaches over this kind of stuff, don’t let it happen, “just smile and nod”.

I get confused over which socks to wear with which pants and shoes. Thanks for saving me from having to figure out which sox to use with which Poiloader.

Thanks to those that worked on this issue. We now know that sox 14.0.1 is the only one to use. Any others give weird stuff.

If people are staring change your socks! But not your Sox!

There is no Sox like old Sox, like no Sox I know!