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Trond Einar Garmo sent in a great review of a little known Windows Mobile Media Player called Phantasm Music Player. English is not his 1st language, but he did such a good job on this review that I am going to let it fly unedited. Thanks for the submission and uncovering a hidden gem.

Phantasm Music Player

One of the greatest mysteries in the history of Windows Mobile programs must be that of software company 40^th Floor. 40^th Floor is a one-man company run by programmer Cornel Huth. Previously 40^th Floor offered iPlay, probably the most advanced audio player ever produced for Windows Mobile devices. It has more features than anything else, with a lot of user controlled configurations. Apart from playing music it can also record, it has a tone generator, an alarm clock, it can show full screen slideshows, it comes with a web server to stream music, supports radio web streams, and more. Unfortunately 40^th Floor stopped selling it this summer. Instead he concentrates on a new player, PhantasmX.

I have never seen any of these programs advertised, and they are only sold through the web-site at http://40th.com. The programs are known to the world mainly through announcements in different PPC forums. The problem is that quite many people don’t have access to this site. Users are blocked based on the IP address. This works quite random also. Because of this the announcements in the forums created quite heated threads. Mr. Huth sometimes answered in these threads, but his tone was often rude and offensive. In Aximsite he was eventually banned because of this. Phantasm was announced in the XDA developer forums in December 2007. The thread that followed became more and more heated with rude comments both ways, and in August 2008 Cornel Huth declared: “US customers only, forever, no exceptions.” Then he left the forum and the thread was put dead by the moderators.

I am not sure if I have the history right here, but iPlay was once sent by an unfaithful costumer from Europe to a hacker in Russia, who spread it on the net. That was probably the reason for the IP ban in the first place – mr. Huth wanted to exclude countries with potential hackers from accessing the website and buying the program. And the criticism in the forums came mainly from non-Americans who wanted to check out the program and also felt it unfair to be called hackers. But mr. Huth felt that all foreigners criticized him, and the result was that he now sells it to “locals only”. This sad story is perhaps the most extreme example how hacking hurts everyone.

To buy Phantasm you first have to download the demo from the website. The demo will produce a code, including your name and location, which has to be sent to the developer. He will then return a serial code that unlocks the demo. In addition to this protection the demo will only play around 3 songs, and last for 4-5 days. After buying it he will produce a “personalised” copy that can be downloaded from the website for a limited time. This copy includes your name and location plus some code. I guess it is another protection against hacking – he will easily be able to track you down.

I am in no way qualified to write a review of any PPC program, and especially not music players. Most importantly it is because I am not an audiophile. I cannot tell you for sure that this program is so and so much better sounding than other programs because my ears aren’t trained to do that. But I will try to give you an impression anyway. The following is based on Phantasm Music Player, version 9.4 that was released in July 2008. I can’t get the latest version, PhantasmX, because his ban of foreigners also means that existing foreign costumers won’t get upgrades.

Compared to iPlay, Phantasm is very scaled down on features. Here you get no web-streams, no recording, no sound generator etc. You just get the basics for playing music. The user interface is very simple and minimalistic. Everything can be manipulated with the D-pad, or you can use a stylus or fingers. The program is “finger-friendly”, that is, it supports left/right finger gestures, but vertical navigation can only be done by a scroll-bar which is more difficult to control with fingers. So the D-pad is the preferred method of controlling the program. Phantasm supports probably all current screen resolutions on WM devices, and it works for all WM5/WM6 or WM2003 devices, touch or non-touch. There is also a custom version for HP iPAQ 310, which is a GPS device running Windows CE 5.0. I suppose that it looks and works more or less the same on all supported devices. That might be the reason why there is no play, pause or stop icons on-screen. Play/pause is toggled with the left soft-key. In full-screen mode only you find fast-forward/backwards and skip to next/previous song icons. Otherwise you have to go to the right soft-key menu. That’s where you find the “stop” function, along with “skip 30 seconds”, “back 15 seconds”, volume etc. There is no progress/navigation bar to take you quickly to any point in a song, and the display doesn’t show “time left” either.

There are five main menus: “music”, “settings”, “now playing”, “clock” and “database control”. The clock is just that – no alarm as in iPlay. On-screen there is also a battery charge indicator, and if you tap it you can see the current power consumption. If in full-screen mode the top bar has a triple function: as a volume slider, playback controls, or controls to navigate in the program. On the left side of the top bar there is a flag icon that brings up a quick menu to change the overall gain by +/- 3db, plus a few other things. On the bottom of the screen (or right hand, if in landscape mode), you can see detailed info on the current song, such as title, length, codec and a thumbnail album art. Between the details info and the list there is a peak indicator that shows if clipping occurs. You can also turn on a VU meter on the menu bar.

To start using the program it is necessary to first scan your storage volumes for music files. These need to be properly tagged as the library is based on the metatags. Phantasm only supports MP3, iTunes-encoded LC-AAC (no HE-AAC), Apple lossless (ALAC), WMA, WMA pro and WMA lossless, and FLAC. Nero-encoded LC-AAC won’t play unless you fix them in an external program, and they won’t be gapless. Each storage volume has to be scanned separately, and a library file is stored on each volume. This is a big advantage for several reasons. First, if you both have a CF card and an SD card plus internal memory it is a lot faster to scan only the volume that has changed. If you only want to add a few new files you can put them in a separate folder, and the program will update only those files and move them to the main music folder. Also, if you have several storage cards, you will always have the current library. All you need to do is restart the program after changing the card. The user only sees the combined library.

Once the files has been imported to the music library you can find them from the music menu, either as “songs”, “album”, “artist” or “playlist”. Playlists are very easy to make. Just select, then press/tap and hold the songs you want to include. When done you can save the playlist or just start playback of the work playlist. You can also filter out files based on year or rating. Once playback has started, after a user-defined delay, the program takes you to the “Now playing” screen. From there you can select either “album art” or “lyrics”, if you have embedded that in your files. Album art is also shown if you put a file called folder.jpg in the same directory as the music files. The program only support embedded lyrics, and the lyrics display is static, that is, it doesn’t scroll automatically. The font size of the lyrics is big, and that is not adjustable. So it requires some manual scrolling.

Phantasm supports perfect gapless playback, except for WMA and WMA pro codecs. A few other WM programs support this too, like Pocket Player, Pocket Music, Nero Mobile or Pocket Tunes, but with different degrees of success. The lack of gapless playback is in my opinion the most serious omission in most music players today, whether it is dedicated hardware players or software players. The need for it depends of course on your listening habits. But there are quite many classic albums that are gapless, like Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” and “Love”, Brian Wilson’s “Smile” and almost everything of Frank Zappa. Some of the gapless software players may be gapless, but can make a “bump” sound instead in the transition between tracks. This happens with Pocket Player on MP3 files, although I can’t hear it if I use Ogg Vorbis or Musepack codecs.

There are three DSP effects: EQ, xfeed and reverb. The parametric EQ has three adjustable centre frequencies. The EQ settings can also have GA control. Because most modern CD’s has been compressed to make it sound as loud as possible, there is no headroom to change the EQ settings without clipping the waveforms. That means the sound will be distorted. The GA control will reduce the overall gain to make room for EQ adjustments without distortion.  

Xfeed is an effect meant to make headphone listening sound more natural. CDs are mastered for listening through loudspeakers. What xfeed does is to leak sounds below 1 khz between the channels, with a little delay. This is a feature you can also find in some high-end headphone-amplifiers, in “Rockbox”, the alternative firmware for iPods etc., and also in some plugins for desktop PC players like Foobar2000 and Winamp. There are two side-effects of this, according to the developer. One is that it reduces turntable rumble, the other is that it reduces listening fatigue or headaches that some get from headphone listening. Xfeed doesn’t, and shouldn’t, colour the sound in any way.

There are two reverb settings: room or club. Putting a reverb effect in a program targeted at audiophiles sounds like a strange decision. I was sceptical at using this in the beginning. But the moderate setting, room, is quite unnoticeable when listening to it on most albums, that is, until you turn it off. Then I want to turn it back on. Like the xfeed effect it makes headphone listening more natural. The reverb effect of iPlay was one of the features that made that program stand out, according to some of the comments I have read. To me the reverb effects in Phantasm seem to be of an equal quality. There are similar effects in some dedicated audio players like the Sony NW-series, but the reverb in Phantasm sounds more natural to my ears.

Then there are some settings that affect the sound level; RVA (“relative volume adjustment”, also called “replay gain control”), a volume limit that set an overall volume boost or cut, and whether volume should be controlled by the device or the device handle. The volume limit makes it possible to set a general volume according to the type of headphone you use, since different types of headphones can have a very different volume output. The EQ, reverb, volume limit and the RVA works in conjunction to avoid clipping.

Phantasm supports playback on bluetooth headphones, and there are settings for AVRCP or A2DP. I haven’t been able to test this. The program also support shuffled or repeated playback. The rest of the settings determine the behaviour or looks of the program. There are several colour themes, including two high contrast themes for bright daylight.

Regarding power consumption iPlay was the “winner” in Werner Routsalainen’s tests earlier. I don’t have the tools or knowledge to do a comparative test of power consumption. But I installed abcPowermeter to see how Phantasm compared to Pocket Player and TCPMP. I turned off all the effects first and started playback of the same song for about 30 seconds. TCPMP and Phantasm came out with approximately the same numbers, while Pocket Player was much higher. With EQ on Phantasm did a little better than TCPMP. Pocket Player was still much higher. With EQ, reverb (“room” setting) and xfeed on Phantasm was still better than Pocket Player with EQ only. With “club” reverb the power consumption raised a little, but was still better than that of Pocket Player. I am not going to give you the exact numbers here, and this was not a scientific test anyway. But the impression is that Phantasm is not a very power hungry player. The power consumption has been one of the considerations 40^th Floor has taken regarding codec support also; this is why the program doesn’t support HE-AAC since it needs more power to decode. HE-AAC is used on low bitrates. But this program is meant to be an audiophile product, so that makes low bitrates meaningless anyway, according to the developer.

Apart from the low power consumption the program is also very compact, taking less space than many competitors. The reason might be that Cornel Huth is a long-standing programmer of the old school, and does much of his work in assembly language. This helps on both speed, size and power consumption. The program should work fine even on the slower devices, with all the power hungry DSP effects at work. On some the competition you can only have one DSP effect at the time.

So what do I think of the program? First, I love the simplicity of it. It is very easy/fast to find the music I want to play and start playback. The UI is very clean and attractive, with big type fonts that should be visible even on small screens. Regarding the sound, as I said earlier, I don’t have the super-ears to decide whether this program is better or not than the competition sound wise. The author claims that it beats all the competition, but also says that you probably need top class headphones to hear it. But if I add some effects the differences between the players become more evident. I use the EQ most of the time. This is very easy to set. It makes sense to adjust three centre frequencies (treble, mid and bass) like you do on your home stereo. I think that the multi-band graphic equalizers in some of the competition can be difficult to control on a tiny PPC screen, so this is a better way to do it. If it is a “modern” album I use the GA control to prevent the music from clipping. I also use the xfeed option. What makes the biggest difference between the players is when I use the reverb effect. I only use the moderate “room” setting – the author says he only uses the “club” setting. I guess it is a matter of taste, maybe depending on choice of music and headphones also. But the effect sweetens the sound quite a bit, without being disturbing on most albums. So I am now hooked on that. Another feature I like very much is the volume limit and RVA control. I don’t want to blow my ears, and it is nice to have a constant volume so I don’t have to adjust that for every album.

For me the single most important feature is perfect gapless playback. I don’t have perfect ears, but I can clearly hear gaps or non-perfect transitions between tracks on gapless albums. And few things irritate me more. I have quite many gapless albums, so this is important. To test it I used Chris Cutlers “Twice around the earth”, a soundscape album consisting of 82 short tracks. The different tracks are crossfaded into each other, so it sounds like one continuous piece. Gaps or bumps between tracks on pieces like this would ruin the listening experience completely. I can confirm that Phantasm worked flawlessly both with LAME MP3 and iTunes AAC.

If I have any dislikes in this program it must be the limited codec support. If you want a lossy codec AND gapless playback, you are stuck with either LAME or iTunes-encoded MP3 or AAC. MP3 is of course the most universal codec around, but it is not the most efficient in quality versus bitrate. AAC is better, but I want to avoid using iTunes also. One reason is that I have many FLAC files that I want to convert to a compressed codec to save some space on the PPC. But iTunes won’t do that directly – you would have to convert via an intermediate format. That takes too long for me. I asked the developer about OGG support, but he can’t do that because of problems with OGG tags. Nero AAC would also be a nice alternative.

The most current version is called PhantasmX. Since I don’t get upgrades anymore I don’t know exactly what has changed. According to the user guide the parametric EQ is now 4-band (version 9.4 had 3-band). Otherwise there are mainly some improvements in the library system. There is now a search function, which helps to locate files in long lists. Also the program has support for the “album artist” tag, very useful for compilation albums. More filters are available. Then there is support for audio books, including change of playback speed and resume. Finally there is now support for “max size” album art and thumbnails in lists.

When I bought the program the user support was excellent. I asked a few questions to the developer both before and after I bought the program, and I received thorough and very informed answers within just a few hours across the Atlantic. Cornel Huth says he will still support prior versions to foreign costumers, but not supply upgrades.

My conclusion is that I would recommend this program highly to anyone that can get it. I am sorry about the “locals only” policy. But I am afraid that Cornel Huth is dead serious about that part. Perhaps the best solution for him in the long run would be to team up with someone else, for example with a hardware developer, to develop an audiophile class music phone that came with Phantasm bundled. I am sure that would be a winner.

Chris Leckness (3549 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.