Wednesday, November 3, 2004
PocketMac Releases ppcTunes
Posted by marlof in "SOFTWARE" @ 05:00 AM
PocketMac, best known for their Mac sync solutions, released a new product called ppcTunes. This application can copy an iTunes for Windows playlist to your Pocket PC or Smartphone, even when you want them to reside on a storage card. Next to that, you can have your files automatically converted to 64 kbps WMA files. I've tested the application out, and found it works as advertised. Around 200 MB of my MP3 files were converted to 100 MB of WMA files, and placed on the storage card of my device. As I have concert damaged ears I can not vouch for the quality of the WMA files, but to me they sounded good enough for the occasional listening. And since I personally never rip in the WMA format, I finally got to choose one of them as a ringtone on my Smartphone. So thank to ppcTunes I now have Follow You Follow Me sounding aloud when my wife calls me. (I know, I know: this dates me, and my taste in music sucks. But hey, that's me!)
As always, there's a downside: ppcTunes isn't a true sync application. This means that if you select "sync on Pocket PC connect" every file is again copied (and converted if necessary) to your Pocket PC. And that can take a very long time, depending on the amount of files you're copying. Next to that, if you change your playlist (delete some files, add some others), only the new ones will be added to your device, the ones you deleted from the playlist will not be removed from your device. So the way I use it is the following: wipe the existing files from the My Music directory I have in the My Documents directory on my Storage Card. Build a nice new playlist in iTunes, my favorite jukebox app. Have ppcTunes to copy this playlist over (autoconverting the files into WMA files) to my device, and I'm done. When I want to change this playlist, I start over. Since I have all of my digital music in iTunes, this really helps me (otherwise I'd have to fire up a different app to do the conversion, and manually copy those WMA files over). What do you think? Is this an application you would buy for $9.95?
As always, there's a downside: ppcTunes isn't a true sync application. This means that if you select "sync on Pocket PC connect" every file is again copied (and converted if necessary) to your Pocket PC. And that can take a very long time, depending on the amount of files you're copying. Next to that, if you change your playlist (delete some files, add some others), only the new ones will be added to your device, the ones you deleted from the playlist will not be removed from your device. So the way I use it is the following: wipe the existing files from the My Music directory I have in the My Documents directory on my Storage Card. Build a nice new playlist in iTunes, my favorite jukebox app. Have ppcTunes to copy this playlist over (autoconverting the files into WMA files) to my device, and I'm done. When I want to change this playlist, I start over. Since I have all of my digital music in iTunes, this really helps me (otherwise I'd have to fire up a different app to do the conversion, and manually copy those WMA files over). What do you think? Is this an application you would buy for $9.95?
