PINE

Any suggestions on the best mp3 software?

Frenchy

I-Pod but you can get an X50 and the sound quality is very good. I also tried a Creative Labs Muvo and was impress by the music quality.

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Frenchy

CdSlc

Don't know if you want a MP3 player or a MP3 software(??) for organizing or converting to MP3 files(??). Assuming you need a MP3 player, here I go...

My wife paid $120 to get this 512MB Creative Muvo Micro N200. Its cool. You can listen to simple MP3 songs, the player has an inbuilt FM tuner so you can listen to FM songs, you can record songs directly from FM onto its flash drive. It can function as a voice recorder. It has CD line in, so that you can record songs directly from any CD player/walkman to the flash drive without a computer. After Apple came out with its 4GB/6GB iPod, I think the price for this MP3 player has fallen to around $75.

Lkingzin53

one program that has the capacity to play ogg, mp4, asx, wmv/a, mp3, avi, divX, mpg and mpeg is Betaplayer. It is highly recommended and easily found when you _search this site_! I think it also has the best codecs and quality, much better than wmp. It plays videos off my wifi network without missing a beat. oh and one more thing, it's free!

kcscout

Wow! Thanks for that. I've used GSPlayer and WMP. Never thought to try BetaPlayer. Read this and thought I'd give it whirl. Glad I did. It runs circles around WMP.

The only thing I didn't like was that the screen dims, but doesn't completely go dark. As I recall, with GSPlayer the screen went completely dark, but the music still played.

Originally Posted by lkingzin53

one program that has the capacity to play ogg, mp4, asx, wmv/a, mp3 and mpeg is Betaplayer. It is highly recommended and easily found when you _search this site_! I think it also has the best codecs and quality, much better than wmp. It plays videos off my wifi network without missing a beat. oh and one more thing, it's free!

runnr548

Gotta love those mp3's!

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Don't Panic!

Which PPC do you have PINE and how many tracks do you want to play?

If it's over 1000 you may need iPlay C/S. Expensive but amazingly full featured.

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RChickenMan

If your concerned with interface, I HIGHLY recommend MortPlayer. I have always been a die-hard betaplayer fan, as it supports many file types, and supports network use very well. However, when I purchased my 2.2 GB microdrive, interface became an issue. MortPlayer allows switching between playlists as one would switch between tracks, etc. It's absolutely wonderful for a person with a lot of storage who wants to use their PPC just as they would use a hardware MP3 player.

Vanamonde

Originally Posted by RChickenMan

If your concerned with interface, I HIGHLY recommend MortPlayer. I have always been a die-hard betaplayer fan, as it supports many file types, and supports network use very well. However, when I purchased my 2.2 GB microdrive, interface became an issue. MortPlayer allows switching between playlists as one would switch between tracks, etc. It's absolutely wonderful for a person with a lot of storage who wants to use their PPC just as they would use a hardware MP3 player.

Does MortPlayer resume properply if you shut the Axim down without shutting down Mortplayer?

Betaplayer and GSPlayer won't resume properply unless you shut them down first.

sto-helit.de

Originally Posted by Vanamonde

Does MortPlayer resume properply if you shut the Axim down without shutting down Mortplayer?

That's just a matter of luck...
It's a system bug (existing since at least PPC2000...), where programs can't do any workaround.
The problem is this: When the system is powered on (or rather resumed - there is no "power off" on PPCs, only standby), WM resumes the running applications at once, and parallel to this it initializes the drivers. Due to this, an application might access a sound driver or storage card while it's not initialized. This leads to all these troubles. I have no clue why Windows Mobile doesn't wait with resuming the programs until the system's in a stable state like all desktop Windows versions are doing... Maybe we're lucky with WM2005...

An additional problem is that there's no way for a program to recognize if the standby mode is entered (i.e. "power off"). So I can't stop playback on power off. And the few ways to realize the power on will work only when it's too late...

btw: If the sleep timer from MortPlayer is used, the playback will be stopped first, and then resumed from this point if the playback is started by the alarm clock or manually.

Vanamonde

Originally Posted by sto-helit.de

That's just a matter of luck...

No it happens all the time, with WMP, Betaplayer and GS Player.

Plus they have no problem initialising the sound hardware because the portion of sound file left in the cache plays back perfectly it's only when the program tries to read the rest of the file off the SD card that it craps out.

Also people have reported that IPAQs don't suffer from this problem, if true it cannot be an o/s bug but a hardware bug in Axims.

Theophilus

Originally Posted by sto-helit.de

That's just a matter of luck... It's a system bug (existing since at least PPC2000...), where programs can't do any workaround. The problem is this: When the system is powered on (or rather resumed - there is no "power off" on PPCs, only standby), WM resumes the running applications at once, and parallel to this it initializes the drivers. Due to this, an application might access a sound driver or storage card while it's not initialized. This leads to all these troubles. I have no clue why Windows Mobile doesn't wait with resuming the programs until the system's in a stable state like all desktop Windows versions are doing... Maybe we're lucky with WM2005... An additional problem is that there's no way for a program to recognize if the standby mode is entered (i.e. "power off"). So I can't stop playback on power off. And the few ways to realize the power on will work only when it's too late...

Great info
I didn't know that, and I think I know quite a good deal about WM... Anyway, nice to know.

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sto-helit.de

Originally Posted by Vanamonde

No it happens all the time, with WMP, Betaplayer and GS Player.

Sure, it's a quite stable situation on every single device.
But whether the error occurs or not on a device is a lottery game. It depends on how fast the system wakes up and when the resumed program tries to access the sound device or storage card. There are a lot of influencing factors here: the device's performance, the drivers, modifications to the system (WM is licensed as open source to the manufacturers, which leads to several compatibility problems, too. Esp. iPaqs are a pain in the *** with those modifications...), shutdown time in the program, ...

Quote:

Plus they have no problem initialising the sound hardware because the portion of sound file left in the cache plays back perfectly it's only when the program tries to read the rest of the file off the SD card that it craps out.

The SD access shouldn't be the problem. Most programs handle this quite fine, and simply try to continue with the next track (for programmers, there's no big difference between end of file and read errors).
I don't know exactly what's going wrong in these cases, since I don't have the WM code (nor wan't to debug it if I had... ).
Maybe it's got something to do with the storage card driver. But a bug in some older iPaqs seems to point at the sound driver: After power on, the sound continued a few milliseconds, and then the sound driver hung up. I.e., no sound at all in all applications until a soft reset...

Quote:

Also people have reported that IPAQs don't suffer from this problem, if true it cannot be an o/s bug but a hardware bug in Axims.

It's more of a combination... It's Axim's "fault" the driver initialization causes troubles when the sound driver (or storage card?) is accessed while this initialization happens. But it's Microsoft's fault these possible conflicts can happen at all. Maybe HP/Compaq even programmed a patch for this WM problem to fix the troubles they once had once and for all...

rob1303

Originally Posted by kcscout

The only thing I didn't like was that the screen dims, but doesn't completely go dark. As I recall, with GSPlayer the screen went completely dark, but the music still played.

Why not turn the screen completely off? In Betaplayer go to settings and assign a hardware button to the "Screen Toggle" option

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Rob