Alternatives to WMP?

[terrypin]

After buying my 1GB CF card I've started trying to make serious use of
WMP. But I'm becoming increasingly exasperated with its limitations.
For example, difficulty of making playlists, unable to display more
than 5 playlists, inability to sort tracks within a playlist, etc.

What recommendations do other users have for an easy-to-use music
player and organizer please?

BTW, is any serious improvement in WMP likely soon please?

Using iPAQ 2210 with WM2003, PI 4.6, PIToday 0.1.0.0913

--
Terry, West Sussex, UK

[Kaber]

If you were using WMA with WMP you might want to consider PocketMVP (http://home.adelphia.net/~mdukette/downloads.html#PocketPC). It now has beta support for WMA audio. It also plays video of course.

[hamishmacdonald]

I bought Conduits' Pocket Player. It's really good. Very customisable, and has features like cross-fade, an equaliser, supports many types of playlists, has .OGG support - on and on. Again, a third party went and built the app that we'd dream would have come with the unit.

It's twenty bucks US, which is not so bad.

http://www.conduits.com

- Hamish

[terrypin]

Kaber, Hamish: Thanks both. Downloaded those suggestions to try.

Using iPAQ 2210 with WM2003, PI 4.6

--
Terry, West Sussex, UK

[hoffm11]

I use pocket music and it works great also!

[maikii]

I've tried most of these alternatives, and I really haven't found one I liked a lot, so I'm sticking with WMP for now.

Some of them are buggy, and crash a lot. Some have tiny controls you can hardly see, with any skin. (For WMP you can download skins with very large buttons, easy to manipulate with your fingers.)

Although some advertise having a better playlist function than WMP, none of them (including WMP) can order the songs in a playlist the way I would like to, the same order in which the songs appear on the original CD they were ripped from. (Seems obvious--but I couldn't find a way to make any of the playlist editors--including the dedicated separate playlist editor PlaylistCE, do that automatically.) (And it wouldn't be hard to do--since the ripping program ripped the files in track order from the CD, the first track on the CD would have the earliest file creation time, etc.)

(If anyone does know of a simple way to do that automatically with one of the playlist editors, please tell us how.) (No, not with renaming the files to start with 01, 02, etc. I mean really automatic.)

(By the way, it has been a few weeks since I tried any of these alternative media players, so I don't know if a new version has just come out of one, which might be better.)

[Janak Parekh]

(No, not with renaming the files to start with 01, 02, etc. I mean really automatic.)
Quite frankly, this is the best way to guarantee they'll be in order. I rip all my files to "ArtistName\AlbumName\NN - TrackName" where NN is the track number.

--janak

[maikii]

(No, not with renaming the files to start with 01, 02, etc. I mean really automatic.)
Quite frankly, this is the best way to guarantee they'll be in order. I rip all my files to "ArtistName\AlbumName\NN - TrackName" where NN is the track number.

--janak

I use Roxio Easy CD Creator 5, which doesn't have options for file-naming when it rips the tracks to files. The file names have the same names as the CD tracks, no numbers. If I have to manually rename the tracks, that's really not worth my time.

Of course one could also manually order the tracks in the playlist (in WMP or any of the others) to be in the same order as the CD (I've done that), looking at the CD jacket to see the order. But also, I'd rather not take the time to do that.

It's really something that should be very easy to do automatically, by ordering the tracks in the playlist by file creation time. It's really amazing that none of the PPC media players (some advertising advanced playlist capability), and even the dedicated playlist creator, can do such a simple obvious thing. I doubt many people care to hear their songs in alphabetical order, or reverse alphabetical order, but for those who don't rearrange the songs manually according to their preference, if a playlist has the same songs as a CD, would probably prefer to have the default song order to be the same as on the CD. I don't know why the programmers don't seem to realize that. (Any of them reading?)

[Kati Compton]

CDex does this auto-naming when ripping. I highly recommend it.

[Janak Parekh]

It's really something that should be very easy to do automatically, by ordering the tracks in the playlist by file creation time.
The problem with this is that file creation times ultimately get messed up when moving files around. Appropriate filenaming is the way to go. And I agree with Kati on CDex -- nice ripping program. :)

--janak

[nic]

ArtistName\AlbumName\NN - TrackName

Ewwww.... you should name it:

ArtistName\AlbumName\ArtistName - AlbumName - NN - TrackName

That way all the criticle information about the file is in the file name and it will still sort correctly. Be kind to your file search engine and yourself. Not to mention anyone you may share your music with.

-Nic