08-11-2003, 05:00 PM
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Sage
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 706
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Multimedia Swiss Army Knife - Pocket Player Review
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:- 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
Audio Playback
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.
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08-11-2003, 05:45 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 338
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Nice review Anthony....
I'd have to say, unless you have a PPC2000 device (that has the ARM processor) **or** you need some unique file format compatibility, you could find much better things to plunk down $19 bucks on.
I guess the cross fade and EQ are neat features that you can't get with windows media player, but jeesh, for the price of WMP (free) it does a respectable job.
Conduits software is always top notch. My opinion is for what you get in this software the price shouldn't be quite so "top notch".
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08-11-2003, 06:40 PM
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Theorist
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 276
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Re: Multimedia Swiss Army Knife - Pocket Player Review
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Anthony Caruana
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.
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I've been playing with Pocket Player for a week or so and I really like it. I love the fact that I can use my fingers to control the player. Anthony mentioned above that he thought it was a weakness that Pocket Player did not do video also. This in my book is a plus. Keep it small, fast, and simple.
I only have two gotcha's:
1st gotcha, if a song is 90% of the way done and I hit the back/re-wind button I'd like it to replay the song it just played, not the previous song. I'm sure this could be a option somewhere.
2nd gotcha is the price. $20 is a bit much for this when WMP works OK. If it was $15 I'd grumble about it, but I'd ebd up buying it because its nice to be able to use my fingers to control it. $10 I'd never look back, no brainer.
I'll play with it till the demo runs out and wait for a deal on it or for a coupon from Handango or something...
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08-11-2003, 06:51 PM
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 555
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Are you sure the equalizer works for Ogg format? All the other players I tried that had an equalizer seemed to have an equalizer that worked only for MP3's...it had no effecct on how Ogg files sound.
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08-11-2003, 06:56 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Dec 2006
Posts: 38
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M3U
What other PPC applications can open M3U playlists? Can the PPC Windows Media player open these for streaming accross a network? I've got a server that I can access via http for streaming music (it uses M3U playlists.
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08-11-2003, 07:54 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 46
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Can this cache music files into RAM during playback? As owner of a Microdrive, that would definitely help out my battery life.
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08-11-2003, 08:08 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 10
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by DualShock
Can this cache music files into RAM during playback? As owner of a Microdrive, that would definitely help out my battery life.
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Yes, it has a feature just for this reason. It goes all the way up to 20480 KB 
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08-11-2003, 08:23 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Jun 2003
Posts: 19
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I've been looking for a player such as this but $20 is too much for what it improves on in WMP - and it only improves on the music playing aspect of WMP. If it was free, on the other hand... 
Really, I just want a music player that supports mp3's and wma's with crossfading and on the fly normalization. Is that too much to ask?
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08-11-2003, 08:47 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 54
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Yes, the equalizer does work with Ogg files! I specifically tried it for that reason, liked the quality, and promptly bought it (when they had the intro special in July). I encode Ogg files at quality level 5, which leads to slightly larger file sizes, but I like the sound quality. With the equalizer, I can purposely get distortion by really raising the levels and using the pre-amp, but I can get good sound quality, even bass, on my Toshiba e310 at slightly lower levels. I don't have many apps on my e310, but this made the list.
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08-11-2003, 09:29 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Aug 2007
Posts: 238
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I just tried the demo; it looks nice, but it will only play .wav and .mp3 and the program itself seems really slow. I'm running WM 2003, BTW.
I thought it would be good since it offered .wma and EQ support, but that doesn't even work.
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Linear Mode
