Review Conduits Pocket Player

PocketNow just issued another good review! 

INTRODUCTION
    I originally bought my Pocket PC with the intention of using it as my portablejukebox. Five minutes after I got it, I discovered that WMP was completely inept at doing anything but crashing (ok, maybe a slight exaggeration). I quickly sought out a replacement, preferably free, and installed the Core Media player. It was adequate, but nothing spectacular. Features included an ugly interface, a basic equalizer, and a general lack of features. Then Pocket Player 2.72 by Conduit came along. Touted to be a “rockin’ way to enjoy music on your Pocket PC or Smartphone,” is this the audio playing software you’ve been searching for? We’ve got the answer ahead!

WHAT’S HOT
   Many Windows Mobile users complain about the instability of Windows Media Player. Apparently, it had something to do with the flux capacitor. Pocket Player is a better alternative with a good bit of control granted to the user. The equalizer actually works well (compared to the buggy Core Media Player equalizer) and the DSP settings can put the bump in your Beethoven and the treble in your Hip Hop. Here’s a list of some of the features:

• Full MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and WAV support
• 10-band Equalizer and Preamp, with presets
• Visualizations and Album Art1 support
• Track metadata tag support, with browsing
• Windows Mobile 5.0 support
• Skinnable
• HTTP, Windows Network, Shoutcast, Icecast streaming
• ID3 v1/v1.1/v2 reading; scans playlist in background
• Playlist manager keeps track of all playlists on device
• Pocket PC Notification Icon playback controls
• DSP Plugin support, including Bass Boost
• User-managed Bookmarks support; jump to a file and time
• Hardware button mapping, button locking
• Bluetooth Remote control and headphones support
• Optional sleep timer
• Automatic screen shutoff

PRODUCT FEATURES

   The interface is completely skinnable. Each skin can have individual saturation and hue adjustments (see below). One thing to check out on here for you music aficionados is the equalizer. The equalizer contains many presets to match most styles of music, as well as a 10 band manual tuning mode for the tweakers out there. To easily change equalizer settings you can just tap the word next to “EQ” in the bottom right corner of the main screen. If you keep tapping it, you can turn it off.

   Besides the main interface, you have the option to pull up a set of simple controls from the today menu. I have yet to see this feature in another player and I have to say it is VERY convenient for us multi-taskers. Check it out. Just click the notification message in the bottom left of your screen.

You are granted controls from the Today Screen.

Pocket Player can actually load an additional plugin that shows what’s playing. Pretty neat!

   And for all you playlist junkies out there (you know who you are), you have a great interface to create, modify, and listen to various playlists. On top of the program automatically pulling in all your songs, it also pulls in playlists and organizes everything for you.

   Lets check out some of the options that make Pocket Player 2.72 really shine. Tapping “menu” on the main screen, then “options” will bring you to the “Pocket Player Settings” tabs. The first one that comes up is the general tab, lets take a look at this.

   This brings up one of my favorite features of this program that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It may seem simple, but “turn screen off after xx seconds” is awesome. Neither Core or Windows Media Player would do this, forcing you to “dim” the screen by holding down the power button to save any battery life while just using the handheld as a music player. You can set the interval with this first pull down box to whatever you desire. Don’t worry though, if any screen from any program besides the main screen from Pocket Player is up, it won’t turn off the screen! I’ll spare you the “screen turned off with music still playing” screen cap, but take my word for it.

   The next tab is “playback.” I highly suggest using the crossfader on this screen. Anybody familiar with iTunes will love this feature. A crossfader is a tool used by DJs to blend the end of one song into the beginning of the next one. You can turn the crossfader on or off using the tick box next to “Crossfade.” Also, you can change how long of an interval at the end of the song is crossfaded. Too short an interval will not be noticed, and too long of an interval will cut off the end of your song. 4 seconds (the default) is a nice happy medium.

Next up we have the “Skins” tab. Nothing too fancy here that comes with the player. However, you can download more skins from Conduits’ website. This is where you would select which skin you want to use. You can also adjust the hue and saturation of the skin.

     Although the equalizer is nice, I highly suggest tweaking the DSP settings in the options menu under DSP. This feature can really add a new aspect to your audio files and you can listen to them like they were meant to be heard. It also can compensate for those two-dollar headphones you use with your five-hundred dollar Pocket PC.

   You can set your DSP settings in this menu and even adjust individual frequency bands for which the DSP will affect the sound. Try fooling around with these settings, they are highly dependent on what type of music you listen to, and how you like your music to sound so they will be different for everyone.

   Anybody with some Winamp experience probably knows, loves, and fears the plugin. I took a look at the installed plugins, as well as the ones available on the website. Currently there are only a handful of additional plugins to download, but the a developer pack is offered for free on the website which means there may be a surge of third-party plugins available for download at some point.

   The visualizations are accessible under the “Vis” tab. Included in the download is a pretty cool set of visualization plugins.

  You can change the visualization settings using the “Vis” tab. Check out the options available.

   We have a few options here. The speed you may want to leave alone because any higher and you will experience some serious slowdown. I do suggest changing “cycle colors” to on at the interval of your choice. What this does is every X seconds the visualization will fade into a new color. Way cool! You can experiment with the different visualization plugins available, as well as change the small visualization you see in the corner of the main screen by the equalizer. Regarding framerates – while the visualization wasn’t super smooth, it was plenty adequate to be enjoyable.

Next up lets take a look at the “Buttons” tab. Here is what it will look like when you pull it up.

   The default setup works fine for me, and is very easy to use especially when you don’t feel like taking out your stylus everytime you want to make a quick change to your volume, current song, etc… If you want to customize the hardware buttons, you can do it here very easily. Just follow the instructions on screen, select the function, then press a button. Also one cool thing you might want to consider is un-checking “Un-map buttons during background play.” If you don’t normally use the buttons, or there is a button you don’t use a lot, you can easily change songs, change volume or anything you want with just a button press while you are hard at work playing solitaire.

The associations tab is fairly self explanatory.

Here’s a shot of the advanced tab, which lets you gain a lot of control over how the program behaves.

HELP SUPPORT
    Everything was self explanatory. I had no problems figuring out the basic playback features and quickly picked up on the more advanced options. A full user guide is available online here.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
    Pocket Player 2.72 should run on all recent versions of Windows Mobile, including Smartphone. It will use up 1MB of your storage RAM and 4MB of your program RAM. It ran well on my Axim x51v on full power mode, and a little sluggish on normal and power save modes, so the more processor speed you have the better, especially if you want to use the visualizations.

BUGS AND WISHES
    The only bug I found was that the playlist will refresh on top of itself while scrolling. You have probably seen this in a lot of music players for your PC such as Winamp. This tends to happen when you have a large playlist, and is not a large issue. The three wishes I have for this program include native M4A support, network file support, and video playback. For some reason people create these M4A files that nothing will play. The network support is something I haven’t seen yet in a mobile player natively, but hey, it’s just a wish right? As far as the video playback goes, this program does music so well, I would trust them to handle my videos too.

PURCHASING
    Pocket Player is available for a reasonable $19.95 here. If you want to try it out, they have a 30 day demo available.