Thread: What's with this Pigtones thing?

Hi – I’m new to this forum and just recently got a deal from Garmin to trade in 2 old Street Pilot C330’s for 2 newer nuvi 52LM’s at a really great price because they were no longer able to support map updates for my old units. First thing I noticed is things have changed big-time in the world of voice add ons.

The premium and free voices in the garmin garage are nice but I was bowled over when I stumbled on the pigtones website. Now those voices are amazing and I would really like to have them for my new units but I think I’m chasing a train that has already left the station.
The first thing I noticed about the pigtones website is while they’re still up and running and you can view all the products and listen to demo slices of the voices for free as soon as you try to place an item in their shopping cart your browser will go nuts and give you an error message the site is unsafe. If you go one click beyond that without committing you’ll see that the site’s security certificate has expired (only about 2 weeks ago) which could leave you exposed to credit card theft and other hacking damages. So that’s problem issue 1 for me.

Then when you get into the technical stuff you’ll see while Garmin is currently using Garmin Express to communicate with your device and support downloads and installations, pigtones is using their own formats with GTones for installations and .VUP voice files instead of the .VPM voice file format being used by Garmin. And there you have issue number 2 for me.

Somewhere between issue 1 and issue 2 arising for me, I started to discover a fair amount of negative feedback about the pigtone website. Everything I’ve said until now is based on fact. What follows is some speculation and guesswork on my part and that’s one of the reasons I’ve posted this here. I’d like to try to get the facts straight and find out what this pigtones thing is truly about.
People claim pigtones’ customer support is bad with emails for help being ignored or only being responded to after several days of delay. They also claim the .VUP voice file format doesn’t work or load on to Garmin devices while pigtones claims their GTones application is supposed to handle all that. Another thing which looks a little fishy on the website is their current promotion for a 4th Year Anniversary sale where you can buy 34 voices for about 25 bucks. The trouble with that is they’ve been in business since 2007 or 2008 so this would be their 8th or 9th year anniversary. You can also read on the pigtones website they claimed to be partnering with Garmin to develop new products in the future. Finally, to get around all the technical hub bub about file formats and compatibility issues I looked for software in the form of a CD. It was out there on Amazon but is currently unavailable with no mention if it will be available in the future.

So there it all is. I love the voices but are these people for real? Are they folding up shop because their big dreams of becoming a Garmin developer fell apart? Does anyone out there have pigtone voices installed and working correctly on a nuvi 52LM? If so, please post a reply because I would sure like to know the answer to that question.

Thanks for reading my Epistle.