Background

I sometimes use my Treo 680 as a voice recorder to capture ideas for songs. For a long time I thought all the files were being backed up to my Mac. It wasn’t until I had to do a hard reset, that I realized they were not restored to the Voice Memo application as selectable voice memos. They were still on my Treo, but I couldn’t get to them or play them.

When I looked through my Palm user data files on my Mac I saw that they were in the backup folder as vpad.pdb files.
[ ~/Documents/Palm/Users/palm_username/Backups] $ ls -al | grep Vpad
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 5430 Jul 5 20:13 07-10-22-16-32-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3782 Jul 5 20:13 07-10-22-16-322-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 188406 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-14-1-24-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 64214 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-20-18-22-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 11590 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-20-18-222-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 79030 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-20-18-23-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 84390 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-20-18-25-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 40790 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-25-19-38-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 60518 Jul 5 20:13 07-3-16-21-37-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 107014 Jul 5 20:13 07-3-20-0-19-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 28038 Jul 5 20:13 07-3-20-0-23-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 43270 Jul 5 20:13 07-3-20-0-25-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 425270 Jul 5 20:13 07-7-24-1-45-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 131254 Jul 5 20:13 07-8-5-0-25-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 317942 Jul 5 20:13 07-8-5-22-36-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 333974 Jul 5 20:13 07-9-17-23-06-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 278870 Jul 5 20:13 08-2-10-18-31-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 85606 Jul 5 20:13 08-5-20-21-25-Vpad.pdb

However, there were no playable audio files where I expected to find them (/Users/username/Documents/Palm/Users/palm_username/Voice%20Memo/). That was when I realized that the hotsync conduit for Voice Memo did not work, and never had been working. There seems to be some incompatibility between the Treo 680 voice memo files and Mac OS X. I don’t see why this has not been fixed yet, but whatever the cause of this negligence on the part of the developers, I was stuck with a bunch of Vpad.pdb files that I could no longer access on my Palm or play on my Mac. Some of them were extremely important to me, containing ideas for an upcoming album.

Details of my scenario:
Palm Treo 680 running Palm OS Garnet v. 5.4.9
Voice Memo version 1.4
HotSync Voice Memo conduit version 1.0 (so that's why!!! :-) )
Mac OS X 10.4.11


Nevertheless, I felt fairly confident that embedded in these pdb files were some kind of normal audio file format. I could not imagine that Palm would have invented an entirely proprietary compressed audio format.
Continue reading ‘Recovering vpad.pdb files from a Palm Treo 680 with Mac OS X’

[Version 1.2.1 2005.06.29]

If you have one of the wonderful USB HotSync and charger cables sold by brando.com.hk, only to find your new device can’t be seen by the system after upgrading to Jaguar, here is the quick and dirty workaround.

This tip was gleaned from reading through a thread at The Gadgeteer, discussing issues people were having with various drivers for these devices, namely the Bafo and Brando branded USB HotSync and charger cables for Palm V and Vx devices.

Continue reading ‘Enabling the PL2303 kext for use with Mac OS 10.2.x – 10.3.x’