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Originally Posted by fmo
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Hey, some of us have already posted our opinions. Let's hear yours!
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For what it's worth, I think that 40iPlay is probably currently the best music player out there for the Pocket PC. Here's a little of my history with PDAs and music players.
When I bought my first PDA more than 2 years ago, I started with a low-end Palm (m130). Deciding that I liked it and wanted something a little better, I quickly upgraded to a used Palm (T|
T), as where I worked, we sold Palms. I used the free version of Pocket Tunes with my music encoded in ogg format as my music player. However, seeing that Palm kept producing PDAs with various issues (lots of them recently had big problems with screen buzz, for example), and reading up on some of the pocket PCs out there, I decided that when I could save up enough money, I wanted to try out the platform to see if I liked it any better. I haven't looked back since.
My first PPC was an Axim x30 basic, which I bought because it was the best-priced (read, lowest price) unit I could get, and I was impatient. I immediately started looking for free music players, starting with GSPlayer. It was decent, but not wonderful - I don't remember now exactly what it was that I didn't like; it may have been the look of the interface, or the fact that some of the sound effects (reverb, 3D, etc) really didn't work well at all. I looked for something else.
I stumbled on Beta Player, which I really liked, and used for several months. It's a good program, and has support for lots of different media formats. I never really used it to watch videos, as I don't really watch many movies, but I thought that it played audio files well. I didn't really like the music interface though - the front screen is very plain, and you can't see the list of songs that you are going to be listening to. The audio quality was good, though.
Then, reading a thread somewhere in these forums, I saw posts about the 40iPlay software, and those who said anything about it either said it was the best ever (great for audiophiles), or ranted because it costs so much. I didn't hear anything bad about it except for the cost. I tried it out - I didn't have long at all because apparently before I had installed the trial version and then promptly un-installed it; thus, when I went to use the trial version again, it had almost expired (I think I only got an afternoon to try it).
When the summer came along and I was working more, I decided to buy it. It's great: the interface has a bit higher learning curve than other players, but it's well worth the effort to learn. It has great sound processing capabilities from reverberation, cross-feed and stereo/surround modes to an 8-band equilizer for which the user can set the center frequency for five of the bands (I don't know if any of the free players have these capapbilities). You can listen to your music over a network if you have wireless, but I guess most of all, the great thing about the player is the extremely high audio quality. I bought it and I love it.
Since then, I've bought the x50v. I have not installed the mixing program that everyone mentions because in looking at the sticky in the x50 forum, the author of iPlay mentions that the software does much of, if not everything, that this other program does. What I don't know, however, is how it makes BetaPlayer (now TCPMP) compare to iPlay.
My 2 cents. I have a cheap pair of Sony earphones (MDR-J20) - I'm wondering if a better pair would make the music sound even better or not. It already sounds pretty amazing.
I guess I should also mention that most of what I listen to is classical music. Many of my siblings play instruments - my older sibling just graduated from Julliard. I'm not really a good musician, but I can recognize when something sounds good. If you haven't tried iPlay, you might want to see how it compares.
Phillip
PS - was that enough of an opinion for you?
