Forge42

Hello all. I've spent the better part of the past 2 days trying to find the perfect setup for my x51v to be used as a music player. This was motivated by the fact that my 40gig iPod bricked 2 days after I got my shiny x51v. Rather than drop the extra cash for a new iPod, I decided to take the plunge and go pure Axim.

I had the following goals in mind for my ideal setup:
1. Must be able to play purchased music from iTunes.
2. Must be easy to organize and interface w/ music collection (for me, that means Artist/Album organization and 1-handed use).
3. Must have a screen power-down function to conserve battery.
4. Must sound good.

#1 proved to be a doozy. I had blindly downloaded iTunes 6.0 and was locked in to the fact that there was no way to remove the DRM from my purchased music. I was ticked. There is a free workaround to this though. I used a smart playlist in iTunes to grab all my purchased music to burn to audio CDs. Then I would be able to re-rip it as mp3s and have it un-protected. The only problem was that this method also destroyed all the id3 tag info, meaning that I would have to go through and re-enter each track's info. I had around 200 tracks and didn't feel like spending that much time on it. I looked around for other options.

This led me to a slick little program called TuneBite. TuneBite is the modern version of a high-speed dubbing tape deck. It basically listens to the line out of any media player and then re-encodes the output as an un-protected mp3. It is also smart enough to keep the id3 tags for each track and store each track in Artist/Album folders. The interface is really simple... you can just drag a playlist from iTunes into TuneBite and literally press the Go button and it does the rest. Of course, because of the way it works, it does take some time. It dubs iTunes at 2x speed, so I could've listened to my purchased music as sung by the Chipmunks if I'd wanted. Instead, I just went to bed and let it do 6 hours of work overnight. TuneBite is also NOT freeware... however, if you are like me and have $200 dollars (or more) invested in purchased iTunes music, $15 ain't a bad price to free it up again.

This met goal #1.. I now had my entire music collection in mp3s. The search for a media player was on. Here are 5 media players I rejected and why

1. Windows Media Player - organizes music well, but interface is clunky and no power-saving
2. GSPlayer - fantastic player.. almost went with this one but I couldn't get things to organize like I wanted (Artist/Album)
3. TCPMP - interface seemed a little confusing to me and organization again wasn't quite right
4. iPlay - I'm a computer savvy guy.. and I couldn't figure out how to even freakin' install this program. If I can't even install it, how bad must the interface be? Although, lots of people do say nice things about this player.. but it ain't cheap.
5. Pocket Music - interface was a bit busier than I liked and again, organization wasn't quite right.

You noticed that I mentioned that players didn't organize things the way I wanted. From using an iPod, I got used to selecting Artist and then Album to play specific music. The players above couldn't do that.. they all just worked off of playlists... and I really don't use a lot of custom playlists. I finally found one player that let me select music based on Artist and Album and that is what I'm going with: MortPlayer.

At first, I didn't think MortPlayer was going to do it either. However, if you set it up so that it looks at a 'root' folder where you have mp3s saved in Artist and Album sub-folders, mortplayer can navigate through these easily. The others could 'sort of' do that, but it was usually a complicated process that was tough to do w/ one hand. Mortplayer can do it w/ one hand (after you customize the buttons properly).

So now I just had one hurdle to overcome. I purchased one of the 8gig CF cards... but my total music collection is larger than that. So, I was going to have to find a way to select out large portions of my music and then organize it in Artist/Album directory structure to be copied over to the CF. Back to iTunes where the smart playlists are good enough that I can use one playlist to get the majority of the music that I want to carry on my axim into one playlist. iTunes also plays nice enough with windows that if you select all the songs in a playlist and then drag them into an explorer folder, it creates a copy of the song. However, the files are just dumped in there w/o directory structure.

That's where the last piece of new software comes in: TagScanner. TagScanner is a very nifty little (free!) program that will do all the dirty work for you. Just point it to the folder where you copied the big block of mp3 files and it will use their id3 tags to create properly named Artist/Album folders. Then, all you have to do is copy those folders over to your CF card, point mortplayer in the right direction, and presto! The perfect mp3 setup! :love:


If anyone has any questions about any of the finer point in this process, feel free to ask. It has taken me a while to figure all this out, so maybe I can save someone some time.