12-08-2005, 01:00 PM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 8,228
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Leaving WMP10 On My Device For A Creative Zen Micro
For years, since the original Pocket PC, and technically a bit before that with Windows Media Player that was installable on the old Windows CE 2.11 Palm-Sized PC's, I have listened to portable music exclusively on my Pocket PC. I always had it with me and it could do the job. That coupled with Audible, either through MS Reader or Audible software itself, my audio needs were met. That changed last year when I got my PDA2K. MS Reader no longer worked with Audible, or at least I couldn't get it to, and installing that beast into RAM when I never intended to use it to read ebooks seemed overkill anyway. To make matters worse, Audible's own software has always been horrible and with the PDA2K, it was unusable. If the screen turned off, the player shut down. That bug I think has been fixed but I no longer cared. I was using a tiny 128MB Creative MuVo I had received as a gift with Audible and it worked quite well.
Windows Media Player on the Pocket PC has never been a great experience, but it has been acceptable. Playlist support for versions prior to 10 was almost nonexistent. Fortunately, a little $9.95 shareware app called CE Playlist would allow you to do anything with music on your device you could do on Windows Media Player on the desktop.
WMP10 on the PDA2K, when it finally came via a ROM update, was a mess. I don't understand the technical reasons for it, but iMate didn't do something right with button mapping so mapping the buttons to do anything was virtually impossible. I could make the D-Pad button register, so that was screen off, but that was it. Nothing else would map. To make matters worse, even though WMP10 worked really good for creating a "now playing" playlist, you couldn't save it! Who wants 1-2GB of music on their device and they always have to dynamically create playlists? I never actually tried to use CE Playlist with WMP10. It probably would have been a good solution, but now I was frustrated on principle. Why build a playlist editor as slick as WMP10 had and not include a simple "save" command?
When I got my JasJar, I was excited about Windows Mobile 5 and one of the first things I tried was WMP10. Same thing, no ability to save a playlist. :frusty: The button mapping thing was all fixed though, so I guess iMate figured out there was more to making WMP10 work for the end user than just making sure it was in ROM.
Fortunately for me, I dropped my MuVo. You'd think something that small, the size of a USB key, wouldn't have enough mass to drop to the floor and be damaged, especially with flash memory. It did though. The backlight quit working and it would chew through a AAA battery every day. After 2 days it stopped working reliably in my USB port to transfer Audible content. I decided to quit trying as I didn't want to fry my PC's motherboard because the USB device was flaky. I touched base with our resident multimedia expert and he recommended a Creative Zen Micro. That was enough for me. 30 minutes later my order with Amazon was done and the next day my new 6GB Zen Micro had arrived. Way bigger than the MuVo but it still made my K-Jam look like an absolute monster.  The first thing I did after installing the PlaysForSure software on my PC was sync over about 2,000 songs. Now to create the playlists on the device.
Wait a minute... what's this? The playlists are there? You mean Windows Media Player 10 on the desktop, when syncing playlists to a Zen Micro also copies them to the device? That made too much sense! Why doesn't it do the same with WMP10 on Windows Mobile devices? :roll: Then, much to my delight, I discovered two awesome bonuses. First, it works with My Yahoo! subscription music. Drag a few of those playlists to the device. Second, bookmarks! WooHoo!!!! I can now listen to two hour 25MB podcasts and not have to remember where I was. Just bookmark it and come back to it later. Of course, it works with Audible as well and can allocate up to 2GB as a USB drive as long as I have the cable with me, which it is always in my computer bag. Suh-weet!
So, with that, for the foreseeable future, I have no desire to even launch WMP10 on my Windows Mobile device. It is really a shame that something as powerful as a Pocket PC has such great potential with playing music and falls so short compared with an embedded device that works better with WMP10 on the desktop than Microsoft's own portable music solution. Maybe WMP11, both on the desktop and Windows Mobile device, will fix these shortcomings, and support gapless playback of music. Hey, I can dream can't I? 
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12-08-2005, 01:40 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Jan 2004
Posts: 46
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What's the big deal about playlists? Aren't they pretty much useless?
If they were able to automatically import new music that met their criteria, they might be useful.
What would really be useful (for me anyway) would be the ability to play any songs randomly based on criteria. For example, I might be in a Metal Mood, so I'd ask the player to only play metal songs. How about the ability to ask for "light rock and folk rock with an emphasis on Arlo"?
The idea of updating every playlist every time I add a new song to my computer and/or PDA seems really absurd. I haven't even had a playlist this century.
[I might even try to do something about this if my development system wasn't in severe crash mode these days :evil: ]
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12-08-2005, 02:12 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 398
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Re: Leaving WMP10 On My Device For A Creative Zen Micro
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Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry
Hey, I can dream can't I? |
My advice: don't it isnt worth it. That is the one main thing that I have learnt since buying a Pocket PC.
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12-08-2005, 02:34 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 24
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I've been using a Creative Zen Micro for months amd I really like it. You can choose a category like Metal and listen to all the Metal on your device. When it downloads the music it tags it with what genre it belongs to. The only complaint I have had is that I tried to use it with Napster-to-GO and the firmware just doesn't upgrade properly and I have a hard time seeing the device on either computer I use. I had to crash it and re-build the software to get it to work correctly again. You can also use it as portable storage if you need to move several GB of data.
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12-08-2005, 02:41 PM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Dec 2005
Posts: 1
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WMP10 or any version couldn't enchant me, i never used it.
I have a PPC for about 7 years, and bougth a new one a short while ago, but on both i never used WMP.
I prefer GSPlayer, as i read (listen) a lot of audiobooks (adict) on my daily 4 hours travel. it has anything you like, most important is that it resumes where it left of, it is not something with cool grpahics, but its purpose is just the thing i need.
Cheers.
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12-08-2005, 02:51 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 59
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Ok, I'm confused. I have a KJAM and I synched about 100 songs on a miniSD card. If I open WMP10 on the KJAM and click Now Playing -> Library -> select My Music -> Genre then I can pick whatever type of music I want to listen to and it queues it all up in the now playing list. How is that not selecting all "Metal" songs and listening to them at once?
Also, any playlists that I sync from the desktop WMP10 show up in the \Playlist folder on my storage card, if I click them they queue up all the songs in the Now Playing list. This appears to be playlists to me????
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12-08-2005, 04:25 PM
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Sage
Join Date: Jan 2006
Posts: 805
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Yes I agree to you sir Hansberry..all I can say that I use the WMP 10 as a 'wow' factor..I show it off to my Palm friends that look my pocket pc has WMP 10..they all get amazed to see a 'poor' carbon copy of desktop media player..stupid people they dont know how crippled it is
Holy sh**, it cant even make a playlist which even ver 9 of ppc could do.
All it has is the fancy graphics and low system resource occupation.
Sunny
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12-08-2005, 04:34 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Jan 2004
Posts: 46
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Paladin27
Ok, I'm confused. I have a KJAM and I synched about 100 songs on a miniSD card. If I open WMP10 on the KJAM and click Now Playing -> Library -> select My Music -> Genre then I can pick whatever type of music I want to listen to and it queues it all up in the now playing list. How is that not selecting all "Metal" songs and listening to them at once?
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Well, I'd have to have WMP10 to see that 
and only 100 songs? Hardly worth it.
Maybe once some carrier lets me get a HTC Universal, I'll check it out. Hopefully by then I'll also be able to get a decent sized memory card.
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12-08-2005, 04:35 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 357
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Re: Leaving WMP10 On My Device For A Creative Zen Micro
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Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry
Wait a minute... what's this? The playlists are there? You mean Windows Media Player 10 on the desktop, when syncing playlists to a Zen Micro also copies them to the device? That made too much sense! Why doesn't it do the same with WMP10 on Windows Mobile devices?
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My imate JAM has been syncing the playlists with WMP10 and Media Center 2005 for over a year. My K-JAM and every other WM5 device I've had does it too. In Media Player on WM5, check out Library>My Playlists. I've even got auto-playlists from Media Center listed there. Is that what you're talking about, or am I missing something?
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12-08-2005, 04:36 PM
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Theorist
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 260
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I have to admit that windows media player is pretty much a waste of space on my device...Just proves more of my theory that the people at Microsoft really don't use the PPC they write the software for, if they did how could they miss such a big "Ooops" as that?
Anyway.. I still use my pocket pc for all my audio needs, but I don't use windos Media player, I use GSPlayer. It's a whole lot more clunkier than I would like it to be for an audio player, but still does the job better than the windows media player on the Pocket PC. In fact I actually tried using my Wifes iPod that I bought her for christmas thinking that if I was really carefull with it I could get about 3 weeks worth of use befoe I had to wrap it back up and give it to her as gift :devilboy: but truth is my Pocket PC had better sound quality than what I eperinced on the iPod - and I also like having my phone calls come through on my PPC-6700 when I am listening to music, where with the iPod I would miss them.
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