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View Full Version : Pocket Player vs. Pocket Music


piperpilot
07-18-2003, 12:31 PM
I've been thinking about using a third party application for playing music on my iPAQ. I've seen a lot about Conduits' Pocket Player and Pocket Mind's Pocket Player. From the product descriptions, they seem pretty similar. Without getting too technical, which would you recommend and why?

hoffm11
07-18-2003, 02:59 PM
My vote it for pocket minds pocket play. I love it. Many cool features and works great.

droppedd
07-18-2003, 03:27 PM
i'm pretty happy with PocketMinds Pocket Music. And it's FREE, although some extra features (skin support, for example) are available for money. It's also got the familiar Winamp interface. although there are times i wish it didn't since a lot of the buttons are so small, but the full hardware buttons customizability makes up for that in a lot of ways.

may as well download it to try out; doesn't cost ya anything. I've also heard of some stability/bug complaints with Conduit's pocket player, but maybe those have been ironed out by now.

jasonc
07-18-2003, 04:30 PM
Personally I use Pocket Music and I paid to get the upgrade for it. It wasn't the skins that attracted me so much, it was the ability to play .ogg music files. Storing my music in 64kbps .ogg format allows me to store twice as much music on my PDA vs. .mp3 format.

piperpilot
07-18-2003, 04:33 PM
It's also got the familiar Winamp interface. although there are times i wish it didn't since a lot of the buttons are so small

That was my impression as well. That particular problem is exacerbated if you try to use other skins for it. You really have to know what the buttons do because the cool custom skins are often not labeled.

droppedd
07-18-2003, 05:12 PM
yeah... i always hated unlabeled winamp skins. I have found a few good ones though... i just don't understand how so many unusable and unfriendly skins get rated so highly. The problem is even worse in Winamp3's full skinning - you can't even rely on knowing where the buttons are located :? since they move around from skin to skin.

jasonc
07-18-2003, 06:51 PM
Yeah, I've got this Love/Hate thing going on with Pocket Music. On the one hand, I love the fact that I've got thousands of Winamp skins to choose from, but on the other hand, I hate that the buttons are so tiny you sometimes have a hard time pressing them. You certainly cannot press them with your finger tips unless you map them to the hardware buttons.

I love the look of the Pocket Player because it has big buttons but I know that there are not many other skins available for it (if any).

Janak Parekh
07-18-2003, 09:53 PM
I'd say -- download the trial/free versions of each (I assume there's one for Pocket Player?) and see which one you prefer.

--janak

Ekkie Tepsupornchai
07-20-2003, 12:59 AM
As Pocket Player is still young, I just ran into a number of bugs and strange behavior. The big buttons were nice and some of the features like the taskbar icon which in essence allowed you to see what was playing and then navigate the next song/previous song or stop/play/pause while on the start page was pretty cool. However, it also puts a command bar icon (today screen bar on the bottom) which is overkill I think.

One strange thing I ran into was when I uninstalled Pocket Player, for some reason my PPC would try to launch it every time I turned on my PPC. Since the app was uninstalled, I would get an error everytime saying that it was unable to find the pocket player executable. I couldn't figure out how to undo this strange behavior (even reinstalling Pocket Player would not make it go away). I ended up having to restore from a previous backup that did not include Pocket Player.

PocketMusic is pretty solid. Yes the buttons are tiny, BUT they do a good job getting around that. First, you can always map the standard play/pause/next/previous to the PPC hardware buttons and/or D-Pad but additionally, if you click on any "open space" within the player, you'll get a pop-up menu which provides access to the playlist editor, options, skin chooser, button mapper, etc.

Also (and this is nitpicky), while both players can run in fullscreen mode, PocketPlayer's fullscreen mode is strictly cosmetic (you get a skinned area which says "Pocket Player" in place of the taskbar) whereas with PocketMusic, playlist area gets stretched to show more songs.

In the end, after sampling both, I purchased PocketMusic. The standard player is free, but the upgrade allows me to play OGGs and of course use any WinAmp skin. Pocket Player also plays OGGs and is currently cheaper ($14.95 vs $19.95), but my feel was that Pocket Player was a bit too ambitious in how it tries to integrate itself into the OS, which always is another variable to consider in the future whenever I run into stability issues with my PPC.

blusparkles
07-20-2003, 03:00 AM
One strange thing I ran into was when I uninstalled Pocket Player, for some reason my PPC would try to launch it every time I turned on my PPC. Since the app was uninstalled, I would get an error everytime saying that it was unable to find the pocket player executable. I couldn't figure out how to undo this strange behavior (even reinstalling Pocket Player would not make it go away). I ended up having to restore from a previous backup that did not include Pocket Player.


This happens when uninstalling some programs and may not be a bug of the program itself. The way to fix this in future is to reinstall the program, open it, close it down properly and then uninstall it. Stupid I know, but it fixes the problem.

Ekkie Tepsupornchai
07-20-2003, 09:30 AM
This happens when uninstalling some programs and may not be a bug of the program itself. The way to fix this in future is to reinstall the program, open it, close it down properly and then uninstall it. Stupid I know, but it fixes the problem.
Are you saying that this only happens with WM2003 or that this is something that has happened in the past with PPC2000 & PPC2002? Pocket Player would be the only program that has behaved this way for me out of about 10 programs I've uninstalled from my HP2215.

In any case, I tried reinstalling Pocket Player. After running it, closing it, and then rebooting before ultimately uninstalling. I still saw the problem.

Jason Patterson
07-26-2003, 02:41 PM
Ekkie,

That problem was an issue with a 2.1 prerelease version (posted to this forum) -- that was 100% fixed in 2.11. If you would like, simply download and install Pocket Player, run it, and then close it. If that doesn't fix it, what's the error that appears on your device?

Also, I wanted to make sure that you knew Pocket Player supports WinAmp skins just like Pocket Music, but is not restricted to their layout.

Thanks!

szamot
07-27-2003, 05:32 AM
Ultimately it boils down to what you like better. For me, this week, Pocket Player is in, next week who knows. I like its clean and crisp lay out and huge buttons and the fact that it does not look like WinAmp but it can. Try before you buy is always the best answer if you are in doubt.