Thursday, December 8, 2005
Leaving WMP10 On My Device For A Creative Zen Micro
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "THOUGHT" @ 05:00 AM
For years, since the original Pocket PC, and technically a bit before that with Windows Media Player that was installable on the old Windows CE 2.11 Palm-Sized PC's, I have listened to portable music exclusively on my Pocket PC. I always had it with me and it could do the job. That coupled with Audible, either through MS Reader or Audible software itself, my audio needs were met. That changed last year when I got my PDA2K. MS Reader no longer worked with Audible, or at least I couldn't get it to, and installing that beast into RAM when I never intended to use it to read ebooks seemed overkill anyway. To make matters worse, Audible's own software has always been horrible and with the PDA2K, it was unusable. If the screen turned off, the player shut down. That bug I think has been fixed but I no longer cared. I was using a tiny 128MB Creative MuVo I had received as a gift with Audible and it worked quite well.
Windows Media Player on the Pocket PC has never been a great experience, but it has been acceptable. Playlist support for versions prior to 10 was almost nonexistent. Fortunately, a little $9.95 shareware app called CE Playlist would allow you to do anything with music on your device you could do on Windows Media Player on the desktop.
WMP10 on the PDA2K, when it finally came via a ROM update, was a mess. I don't understand the technical reasons for it, but iMate didn't do something right with button mapping so mapping the buttons to do anything was virtually impossible. I could make the D-Pad button register, so that was screen off, but that was it. Nothing else would map. To make matters worse, even though WMP10 worked really good for creating a "now playing" playlist, you couldn't save it! Who wants 1-2GB of music on their device and they always have to dynamically create playlists? I never actually tried to use CE Playlist with WMP10. It probably would have been a good solution, but now I was frustrated on principle. Why build a playlist editor as slick as WMP10 had and not include a simple "save" command?
When I got my JasJar, I was excited about Windows Mobile 5 and one of the first things I tried was WMP10. Same thing, no ability to save a playlist. :frusty: The button mapping thing was all fixed though, so I guess iMate figured out there was more to making WMP10 work for the end user than just making sure it was in ROM.
Fortunately for me, I dropped my MuVo. You'd think something that small, the size of a USB key, wouldn't have enough mass to drop to the floor and be damaged, especially with flash memory. It did though. The backlight quit working and it would chew through a AAA battery every day. After 2 days it stopped working reliably in my USB port to transfer Audible content. I decided to quit trying as I didn't want to fry my PC's motherboard because the USB device was flaky. I touched base with our resident multimedia expert and he recommended a Creative Zen Micro. That was enough for me. 30 minutes later my order with Amazon was done and the next day my new 6GB Zen Micro had arrived. Way bigger than the MuVo but it still made my K-Jam look like an absolute monster. :) The first thing I did after installing the PlaysForSure software on my PC was sync over about 2,000 songs. Now to create the playlists on the device.
Wait a minute... what's this? The playlists are there? You mean Windows Media Player 10 on the desktop, when syncing playlists to a Zen Micro also copies them to the device? That made too much sense! Why doesn't it do the same with WMP10 on Windows Mobile devices? :roll: Then, much to my delight, I discovered two awesome bonuses. First, it works with My Yahoo! subscription music. Drag a few of those playlists to the device. :) Second, bookmarks! WooHoo!!!! I can now listen to two hour 25MB podcasts and not have to remember where I was. Just bookmark it and come back to it later. Of course, it works with Audible as well and can allocate up to 2GB as a USB drive as long as I have the cable with me, which it is always in my computer bag. Suh-weet!
So, with that, for the foreseeable future, I have no desire to even launch WMP10 on my Windows Mobile device. It is really a shame that something as powerful as a Pocket PC has such great potential with playing music and falls so short compared with an embedded device that works better with WMP10 on the desktop than Microsoft's own portable music solution. Maybe WMP11, both on the desktop and Windows Mobile device, will fix these shortcomings, and support gapless playback of music. Hey, I can dream can't I? :D
Windows Media Player on the Pocket PC has never been a great experience, but it has been acceptable. Playlist support for versions prior to 10 was almost nonexistent. Fortunately, a little $9.95 shareware app called CE Playlist would allow you to do anything with music on your device you could do on Windows Media Player on the desktop.
WMP10 on the PDA2K, when it finally came via a ROM update, was a mess. I don't understand the technical reasons for it, but iMate didn't do something right with button mapping so mapping the buttons to do anything was virtually impossible. I could make the D-Pad button register, so that was screen off, but that was it. Nothing else would map. To make matters worse, even though WMP10 worked really good for creating a "now playing" playlist, you couldn't save it! Who wants 1-2GB of music on their device and they always have to dynamically create playlists? I never actually tried to use CE Playlist with WMP10. It probably would have been a good solution, but now I was frustrated on principle. Why build a playlist editor as slick as WMP10 had and not include a simple "save" command?
When I got my JasJar, I was excited about Windows Mobile 5 and one of the first things I tried was WMP10. Same thing, no ability to save a playlist. :frusty: The button mapping thing was all fixed though, so I guess iMate figured out there was more to making WMP10 work for the end user than just making sure it was in ROM.
Fortunately for me, I dropped my MuVo. You'd think something that small, the size of a USB key, wouldn't have enough mass to drop to the floor and be damaged, especially with flash memory. It did though. The backlight quit working and it would chew through a AAA battery every day. After 2 days it stopped working reliably in my USB port to transfer Audible content. I decided to quit trying as I didn't want to fry my PC's motherboard because the USB device was flaky. I touched base with our resident multimedia expert and he recommended a Creative Zen Micro. That was enough for me. 30 minutes later my order with Amazon was done and the next day my new 6GB Zen Micro had arrived. Way bigger than the MuVo but it still made my K-Jam look like an absolute monster. :) The first thing I did after installing the PlaysForSure software on my PC was sync over about 2,000 songs. Now to create the playlists on the device.
Wait a minute... what's this? The playlists are there? You mean Windows Media Player 10 on the desktop, when syncing playlists to a Zen Micro also copies them to the device? That made too much sense! Why doesn't it do the same with WMP10 on Windows Mobile devices? :roll: Then, much to my delight, I discovered two awesome bonuses. First, it works with My Yahoo! subscription music. Drag a few of those playlists to the device. :) Second, bookmarks! WooHoo!!!! I can now listen to two hour 25MB podcasts and not have to remember where I was. Just bookmark it and come back to it later. Of course, it works with Audible as well and can allocate up to 2GB as a USB drive as long as I have the cable with me, which it is always in my computer bag. Suh-weet!
So, with that, for the foreseeable future, I have no desire to even launch WMP10 on my Windows Mobile device. It is really a shame that something as powerful as a Pocket PC has such great potential with playing music and falls so short compared with an embedded device that works better with WMP10 on the desktop than Microsoft's own portable music solution. Maybe WMP11, both on the desktop and Windows Mobile device, will fix these shortcomings, and support gapless playback of music. Hey, I can dream can't I? :D
