The Quest for Portable Music & Podcast Sanity

Oy.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my trusty 20GB Rio Karma music player hath passed away almost at the ripe age of 4. I mourned my loss not just for the music but the personal attachment I had to that gadget. It did everything I wanted, the way I wanted and the way I expected. You could throw any type of music file at it and it would never tell you you couldn't play it. iTunes songs? It played em. DRM'd (that you buy online that you can only play on 1 or 2 machines/devices.) Music Files? It played em. Wacky non-standards-compliant VBR MP3's? Played.

You wouldn't believe the amount of crappy music players out there on the market right now. I know people love their iPods, but they are pretty proprietary and add a extra layer of hassle (iTunes) I don't want. Everything out there seems to want to protect you from your own music by introducing proprietary music loading software on your PC. Everything I looked at made me cringe in one way or another. Example: Microsoft's PlaysForSure certified or Microsoft's Zune certified? Do I even want to choose one over the other, or these both over competing technologies?

No. In fact...HELL NO. I don't know what the music industry thinks, but it seems to think everyone's got time to dink around with their music collection handpicking songs to put on so they can listen to the same songs over and over until it's reloaded with more handpicked songs. Oh I know, you can have iTunes randomly pick songs and shuffle them on your player, but even then, iTunes would double or triple my music library file space when it imports my existing collection into a iTunes library. I still fail to see the point in that system...but anyway....

Also, whatever I did get would have to be able to interface with podcasts easily.

Music players on the market as it stands now, just plain suck with the exception of some iRiver hard drive products. There, now you don't have to go find out for yourself the hard way. That still left me with the problem of no music player for the car. I had to find something, or I was going to go with the iRiver units, but even that wasn't "Like my Rio" because there was no network jack on the iRiver units. Boy that was a nice feature, my Rio accessible from any computer on the network at my house....

Before I made my decision I thought it would be a good time to give the current PocketPC Music Player software market another look. Before the Rio I tried using my PocketPC to play music, and yeah, it worked, but not without it's own hassles. Things like choppy music on certain VBR MP3's, lousy Filename/Tag support, and very very limited space on the storage cards killed the novelty off quick back then.

This time around, there are numerous freeware and shareware music players competing for a PocketPC owner's love. Add to this that my PocketPC needs have evolved since then and I am now using a PocketPC Phone. How well can a music player work on this phone? Also, how can I get my Phone with it's proprietary 1/8" stereo/mic, headset jack to play on my car stereo?

Oy. At this point, I think maybe my needs are too complicated....

I spent some time on this, and after trying many many many music programs, I found myself REALLY liking Pocket Player. Like, alot. It can handle all the music I throw at it as well as has support for some formats I never heard of. It wins in that department. I can bore you with some more details but just know its hands down the most user-friendly, customizable, kick-ass PocketPC music program out there.

With one problem, it is kinda crappy about the way it handles podcasts over a slow internet connection like my mobile phone has. (You see we live in a 2ndary market which means I get slow internet and everyone else south of Flint, MI gets fast EV-DO internet.) Over my slow connection, the podcasts can't be "live streamed" unless I want to listen to a very choppy podcast that pauses every 5 seconds. Which I don't. Ever. I don't neccesarily need to have a streamed podcast, I'd appreciate it downloading the whole thing in the background so I can play it later, but thats not how PocketPlayer handles it's podcasts. So now we add to the list.

Where are we? This is what I need: "Something I can use to play downloaded Podcasts, that picks random songs from my music, picks new music I downloaded and haven't heard, have it all play thru my car stereo ,and automatically get music on this PocketPC Phone - without me thinking."

Yes, ok, I'll admit, I'm my own worst enemy on this one. But, it turns out, it can actually be done. And I will admit it's not super slick but it works the way I need it.

Recipe:
1 PocketPlayer (You may substitute the default PocketPC Media Player, it's not too bad)
1 PPCTechs.com - Sprint PPC-6700 3.5mm Stereo Headphone Adapter with Built-In Mic & Answer Button (P/N: PPCPADPT20)
1 Generic Radio Shack Tape Cassette Adapter
1 Juice (Formerly iPodder)
1 Windows Media Player (meh)
1 PodNova.com account (optional)


Heres how it works:
I setup a PodNova.com account and then tell it what podcasts I want to subscribe to. I download Juice (freeware) that reads my PodNova.com account and pulls in the subscriptions and begins downloading the latest episodes automatically. I could skip the PodNova account, but I like being able to add a podcast from home or from work while I'm thinking about it rather than wait until I'm at work to re-find them to add to Juice. These episodes are dumped into a folder in my music collection called !Podcasts. Juice also handles cleaning up old episodes. Then in Media Player I setup an Auto-Generated-Playlist that will add anything under a week old that is in the !Podcast folder. I then assign that playlist to auto-sync to my PocketPC Phone using the sync feature of Windows Media Player. I also assign another playlist to find any new music from that week that I downloaded but hasn't been played. And if that wasn't enough, there's a 3rd playlist that will randomly pick crap from my collection just to fill it up. So everytime I put my PocketPC Phone in the cradle to sync my contacts and stuff, it's syncing those 3 playlists.
When I go to work, lunch, or back home I hook the PocketPC Phone up to the PPCTechs adapter which is hooked up to the RadioShack Cassette adapter that then plays through my car stereo.

And it sounds great in case you are wondering. PocketPlayer and the default PocketPC Media Player will also both pause the music if a phonecall comes in, and then it will start playing again from where it left off. Nice feature. And because the PPCTechs adapter has the mic and answer button, when a call comes in I hit that button to answer and talk to the other person hands-free. I even found a nice minimalist "skin" for PocketPlayer that you see to the right. It's black. It's functional.

So finally, a music setup I can use to play music. I'll admit to two drawbacks, 1) 1gig memory card on my PocketPC is not the 20gig I am used to on the Rio, but that's ok because I'm constantly syncing the PocketPC anyhow so 1gig ends up being "just right". The Rio did have an automatic shuffle and sync option but the program would have to be running for it to do that. I didn't sync very often because of that. And 2) It seems I have to manually delete songs I no longer want from the PocketPC for it to put more stuff on. That hasn't been a real problem because most of the time I want to listen to it at least once before it gets pulled off the player.

And because I did it all on my PocketPC Phone, I didn't need to buy a separate $100-$400 music player.

Yay!

And just so you don't think I wrote this all the while thinking my audience cares, this is the aPathetic blog, don't think that I don't know that you don't care. :)