Engine Sound File Download Time

Don't try now, MTH is having network problems while they're moving to their new HQ.

June 2, 2021 - M.T.H. Electric Trains office and phone support hours may be limited this week as the move to the new, smaller location in Elkridge, MD wraps up. The phone system is slated to roll over and be active this week, however, phone coverage may be spotty as the staff is smaller and some are out on vacation. The phone extensions for M.T.H. employees who have remained with the smaller M.T.H. have not changed.

For the week of May 30th, M.T.H. will not have high-speed internet access in the new location. Unfortunately, this will affect several services on the M.T.H. website including for consumers, the functionality of the Product Locator. The rest of the mthtrains.com website should continue to function as normal.

Thanks for the heads up, but I want to copy the file from the engine on the track to the computer thru the TIU and it is taking some time.  Tried with both rs232 and usb and both equally slow.  About 1 1/2 hours for a ps3 engine.  It is a separate track and TIU I am doing this with.  Last time I did this was a ps3 engine.

Thanks for input.

Read it wrong, my bad.

the load to the computer is much longer when I tried it.

I'd really recommend getting the files from the MTH site. I know that they don't always work. Still better to me.

I imagine there's factors that make the process longer? Are you using DC power? track signal strong? Wire length correct? etc.

Try pure DC power, around 16 volts, or at least a pure sine wave AC power.  I use a bench DC power supply, many "DC" transformers have a pretty ugly looking DC coming out.  Use only a short test track and use 20-30 feet of cable between the TIU and the track.  That will emulate what MTH has (or had a few years ago) on their test benches.  Apparently, for PS/3, the cable between the TIU and track was more necessary than with PS/2.

I see typical load times of 20-30 minutes for PS/3 sound files to engines, they're much slower than PS/2 file loads.  The load time for PS/3 chain files should be fairly short, no more than 4-5 minutes.

Reading the files back from the engine sometimes doesn't work out, never bothered to figure out why.  I always go to the source and download them.  I also have all the sound/chain files from the MTH site locally so I'll never be out in the cold for a file.

For my laptop (Core i7-7820 w/ 32GB RAM running Windows 10 Pro), it took about 30 minutes to download a PS3 file from an engine on the track to my laptop. I tend to walk away and do something else while the application does its thing.

What is the product number of the engine you were going to copy?  I may have the file already downloaded in my personal archives and can email it to you. When the future of MTH was up in the air, I downloaded all the sound files from engines in my collection (and everything I could from the MTH website. Great minds think alike @gunrunnerjohn!) in case the  website went away.

Bryce

I have ALL the sound files, so it would be even easier for me to post it.

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

I have ALL the sound files, so it would be even easier for me to post it.

I am sure one or two fell through the cracks but I think I got them all

There are a few more than 3,000 sound files for PS/2 and a similar amount for PS/3 in ZIP files.

The TIU will communicate with a PC at a maximum rate of 9600 BAUD. What this means is that a 1MB PS2-5V file will download in about 15 minutes and a 4mb PS3 file will download in about 1 hour from an engine.

The upload is a different story. Most of the MTH files are not exactly 1, 2 or 4 Megabytes in size. I uploaded a PS2-5V file from the MTH site that was only 896 KB (0.875 MB) in size and it only took about 12 minutes. When I went to download that file from the engine, it took 15 because the DCS Consumer loader downloaded each memory space on the engine weather it is used or not. The upload will only load the occupied memory addresses and skip those that are not used and hence takes less time.

Weather you have latest and greatest Core i7 with 512Gb of RAM or a 286 made in the late 80's, won't have any effect the speed of the upload or the download. I have tested AC vs. DC and long wires vs short wires between the track and the TIU and haven't noticed any difference in speed. Keep in mind that all of my tests were performed with a REV. L TIU, mileage may vary with older REVs of TIU's. Lastly, my previous REV. G TIU's had a hard time uploading & downloading from PS3 engines.

OK.

What they said!

Thanks everyone for the good advice and info.  We downloaded a 4 mb ps3 file in about 90 min.  We uploaded a modified 3v file in about 23 min.   Laptop not an issue, I7 quad, plenty of speed especially for the slow transfer rates.  Rev L TIU, latest sw and 5.0 loader.  Using usb cable with drivers from MTH newsflash on com5.  Tiu powered with 100 watt brick and using x1000 to directly power 40 in fast track section using about 2-3 ft of wire length. 

Worked well and my son, Trainman Dan, was able to transform sounds on his GN mikado to a more appropriate chuff and whistle for him.  It was his project and he did a nice job with it and learned a lot about DCS, sound files, programming...

Thanks for all the great info!

@H1000 posted:

Weather you have latest and greatest Core i7 with 512Gb of RAM or a 286 made in the late 80's, won't have any effect the speed of the upload or the download. I have tested AC vs. DC and long wires vs short wires between the track and the TIU and haven't noticed any difference in speed. Keep in mind that all of my tests were performed with a REV. L TIU, mileage may vary with older REVs of TIU's. Lastly, my previous REV. G TIU's had a hard time uploading & downloading from PS3 engines.

I get consistently better speeds with a pure DC power supply on the bench powering the board being loaded.  That's especially true for PS/3 stuff.   I have only downloaded from a board once, just to see if I could do it.  Truthfully, I've never had any occasion other than a test to read the sound file from an engine.  I'd rather go to the source and upload one fresh to the board.

Just tonight I had an oddity using the transformer because I got lazy, it claimed I had a duplicate engine on the tracks!  I changed to DC and all was well.

It's simple math. At 9600 Baud the maximum transfer rate is 960 bytes per second. A 4 Mb file download is 4,096,000 bytes. It will take around 4,267 seconds or 71 minutes to download, it will never be less than that by significant amounts. I tried every piece of "witch craft" offered on the forum and was never able to beat 68 minutes. My older REV. G TIU's did perform slower for whatever reason with PS2 engines. I only have REV. L TIU's now so I can't really test any further.

My test rig at the time consisted of a Z1000 on a 30" piece of track with about 3 feet of wire between the TIU and track and a lighted lock-on. Switching to DC or using longer wire didn't speed anything up on either the UP or Download.

There might be more variables at play for some but the best advice I can give is to use a later REV. I or L when doing anything with a PS3 engine... my results with the REV. G models were always terrible.

@H1000 posted:

It's simple math. At 9600 Baud the maximum transfer rate is 960 bytes per second. A 4 Mb file download is 4,096,000 bytes.

I wonder if that applies to the USB connection.   I haven't actually looked to see how they do the serial port emulation using the USB direct to the Rev. L TIU.

MTH does go back and update SF based on changes made sometimes.  I would always go to MTH for the file first.  Save it that way.  G