Monday, August 11, 2003
Multimedia Swiss Army Knife - Pocket Player Review
Posted by Anthony Caruana in "SOFTWARE" @ 09:00 AM
The Pocket PC is a great platform. The built-in software lets you do most things pretty well. However, for the real enthusiast there is always room for applications that extend the Pocket PC and let you get more out of your device. Pocket Player fills the gap by giving you a fully skinnable, easy to use player for many audio formats.
Pocket Player by Conduits is a great application. Everything from installation to using it for the first time works smoothly. Coupled with Conduits' great support and committment to this product, this a great application for anyone who regularly listens to music on their Pocket PC.
How did I Test Pocket Player?
I tested Pocket Player (version 2.1) by installing it to the default location on my near-new iPAQ 2210 running Windows Mobile 2003. I accepted all of the default installation options. I used my Sennheiser ear-bud headphones (pretty low end) and ran all of the music from a Sandisk 128 MB SD Card. While listening to music I always had at least one other application running on the Pocket PC to simulate real world use. For example, while listening to music I always played a game of Jawbreaker (man, that's so addictive) or read my Pocket Bible.
What's under the hood?
Pocket Player is the "hamburger with the lot" of audio players. It combines the best features of many different media players and supports a wide variety of audio formats. It is fully skinnable with support for both Pocket Player formatted skins (PSZ) as well as any Winamp 2.X skin (WSZ).
Pocket Player supports the following formats:
As soon as I launched Pocket Player it detected the music files I had on my SD card in the /My Documents/Music folder. All I had to do was press the play button on the screen and the music started playing.
Audio Playback is CD quality stereo with support for gapless playback and optional crossfading. There's a 10-band equalizer and preamplifier for Ogg Vorbis and MP3 formats. It supports equalizer genre presets and can auto-load equaliser presets per track. This is a great feature if you listen to different types of music that sound best with specific equalizer settings. There is also a volume slider that gives nice, fine control.
Figure 1: Pocket Player with the Steel Skin
Playback quality was great. I'm not much of an audiophile but all of the tracks I listened to (ranging from dance music to punk and heavy metal) sounded clear with very little distortion even with my fairly low end headphones.
Playlists
Playlists in Pocket Player are easy to manage. You can save and retrieve playlists as well as rename lists and save them to either RAM or a storage card. There are plenty of sorting options for your playlist (as well as random sorting) and you can shuffle the order of tracks by dragging and dropping. Pocket Player supports all known playlist formats (M3U, PLS, ASX, PLT, LST).
You can select and play a track from the Playlist screen by either pressing an onscreen button or selecting Play from a tap-hold context menu. You can see in the figure below that in the top right corner of the Playlist window that there is a "Reorder" selector so that you can sort songs easily. You can also drag and drop songs in any order you like .
Figure 2: The Playlist Screen
Customizing
The Pocket Player interface is very flexible. You can use both Pocket Player (downloadable from Conduits) and Winamp skins to change the look, feel and function of the user interface.
You can also set which file types are associated with Pocket Player easily just by making selections from the Options dialog.
Figures 3a, 3b, 3c: Choosing a Skin, Setting File Associations and Setting Button Assignments
Buttons are easily assigned to all major functions with the left and right controls already programmed to the next and previous track functions and the up and down control assigned to volume up and down. The Action button activates the play/pause function. Button assignments can be easily added in the same way as Windows Media Player.
Gotchas
Pocket Player itself does exactly what it sets out to do very well. It lets you play audio from lots of different formats through a clear interface. However, in my opinion its greatest weakness is that it only supports audio playback. If it supported a wide variety of video formats as well then it would be a must have application.
For many Pocket PC users the question is not which media player to spend money on but whether you need to spend any money on a player given that Windows Media Player is included with the operating system and works pretty well. Where Pocket Player separates itself from WMP is in its support for a wide variety of file formats and its superior control of playback options.
Where To Buy
The software can be downloaded from Handango (affiliate link) at a cost of $19.95 USD. Returning customers can buy upgrades for $9.95 USD. Before purchasing Pocket Player, Conduits offers a 30 day trial which gives you plenty of time to do a thorough evaluation.
System Requirements
Pocket Player installs to Pocket PCs running Pocket PC 2000 (ARM only), Pocket PC 2002, and Pocket PC 2003. It uses 1,180 K of storage space and can be installed to a storage card (although I did not test this).
Conclusions
Pocket Player is a great audio player. It's easy to use and delivers many features not found in WMP and other audio players. If you listen to a lot of music on your Pocket PC then Pocket Player would be a good investment. Conduits is very committed to good service. This was very evident in their response to requests for help and enhancements when Pocket Player Version 2 was released in early July.
Pocket Player by Conduits is a great application. Everything from installation to using it for the first time works smoothly. Coupled with Conduits' great support and committment to this product, this a great application for anyone who regularly listens to music on their Pocket PC.
How did I Test Pocket Player?
I tested Pocket Player (version 2.1) by installing it to the default location on my near-new iPAQ 2210 running Windows Mobile 2003. I accepted all of the default installation options. I used my Sennheiser ear-bud headphones (pretty low end) and ran all of the music from a Sandisk 128 MB SD Card. While listening to music I always had at least one other application running on the Pocket PC to simulate real world use. For example, while listening to music I always played a game of Jawbreaker (man, that's so addictive) or read my Pocket Bible.
What's under the hood?
Pocket Player is the "hamburger with the lot" of audio players. It combines the best features of many different media players and supports a wide variety of audio formats. It is fully skinnable with support for both Pocket Player formatted skins (PSZ) as well as any Winamp 2.X skin (WSZ).
Pocket Player supports the following formats:
- MP3 (CBR and VBR, up to 320 kbps)
- Ogg Vorbis
- WMA
- WAV (useful for managing Voice Notes; can play compressed WAV)
- HTTP Streaming (both standard and Shoutcast/Icecast streaming) and Windows Network Share Streaming
- ID3 v1/v1.1/v2 reading; scans playlist in background
As soon as I launched Pocket Player it detected the music files I had on my SD card in the /My Documents/Music folder. All I had to do was press the play button on the screen and the music started playing.
Audio Playback is CD quality stereo with support for gapless playback and optional crossfading. There's a 10-band equalizer and preamplifier for Ogg Vorbis and MP3 formats. It supports equalizer genre presets and can auto-load equaliser presets per track. This is a great feature if you listen to different types of music that sound best with specific equalizer settings. There is also a volume slider that gives nice, fine control.
Figure 1: Pocket Player with the Steel Skin
Playback quality was great. I'm not much of an audiophile but all of the tracks I listened to (ranging from dance music to punk and heavy metal) sounded clear with very little distortion even with my fairly low end headphones.
Playlists
Playlists in Pocket Player are easy to manage. You can save and retrieve playlists as well as rename lists and save them to either RAM or a storage card. There are plenty of sorting options for your playlist (as well as random sorting) and you can shuffle the order of tracks by dragging and dropping. Pocket Player supports all known playlist formats (M3U, PLS, ASX, PLT, LST).
You can select and play a track from the Playlist screen by either pressing an onscreen button or selecting Play from a tap-hold context menu. You can see in the figure below that in the top right corner of the Playlist window that there is a "Reorder" selector so that you can sort songs easily. You can also drag and drop songs in any order you like .
Figure 2: The Playlist Screen
Customizing
The Pocket Player interface is very flexible. You can use both Pocket Player (downloadable from Conduits) and Winamp skins to change the look, feel and function of the user interface.
You can also set which file types are associated with Pocket Player easily just by making selections from the Options dialog.
Figures 3a, 3b, 3c: Choosing a Skin, Setting File Associations and Setting Button Assignments
Buttons are easily assigned to all major functions with the left and right controls already programmed to the next and previous track functions and the up and down control assigned to volume up and down. The Action button activates the play/pause function. Button assignments can be easily added in the same way as Windows Media Player.
Gotchas
Pocket Player itself does exactly what it sets out to do very well. It lets you play audio from lots of different formats through a clear interface. However, in my opinion its greatest weakness is that it only supports audio playback. If it supported a wide variety of video formats as well then it would be a must have application.
For many Pocket PC users the question is not which media player to spend money on but whether you need to spend any money on a player given that Windows Media Player is included with the operating system and works pretty well. Where Pocket Player separates itself from WMP is in its support for a wide variety of file formats and its superior control of playback options.
Where To Buy
The software can be downloaded from Handango (affiliate link) at a cost of $19.95 USD. Returning customers can buy upgrades for $9.95 USD. Before purchasing Pocket Player, Conduits offers a 30 day trial which gives you plenty of time to do a thorough evaluation.
System Requirements
Pocket Player installs to Pocket PCs running Pocket PC 2000 (ARM only), Pocket PC 2002, and Pocket PC 2003. It uses 1,180 K of storage space and can be installed to a storage card (although I did not test this).
Conclusions
Pocket Player is a great audio player. It's easy to use and delivers many features not found in WMP and other audio players. If you listen to a lot of music on your Pocket PC then Pocket Player would be a good investment. Conduits is very committed to good service. This was very evident in their response to requests for help and enhancements when Pocket Player Version 2 was released in early July.
