Database Users

Windows Media Player who's using it reliably?

Hi there,
Is anyone using Windows Media Player to play music on their SD card ?
At first glance Windows Media Player seems great being able to sync with your playlists and have Album covers displayed on the player similar to an ipod. A2DP works and you can control music with AVRCP ..but.. It seems to be the most unreliable piece of software out there. From personal experience syncing seems to hang after 4-5 songs unless you tap the device screen. The song library on the SD card suddely disappears and you have to delete the MSMETDATA directory and the WMDRM directory on the card to be able to get WM player to find the files and add it back to the library.
So what other Players are people using instead?

Hmm, this may not be helpful to you, but I use WMP with no problems, BUT, I manually transfer my music to my SD card. I know there are other players out there that most people here like better than WMP, but for my purposes and what I do (listen to music on my SD card but no synching ever required, and also stream music/video from my home pc to my Tytn) WMP works more than fine for me. Even though the other players are hands-down more rich in features, I'd rather not use up precious storage space when WMP works great for me.
Sorry if that doesn't help, I know your question seemed to be more geared toward synching music. If you're synching DRM'ed music files, good luck, sometimes nothing can be more of a pain in the a**!

By the way, I'm assuming you're talking about version 10 of WMP as far as what you have on your desktop? Microsoft just announced today that WMP 11 is out of beta and is full release version now. It specifically talks about addressing issues with synching to Pocket PC in the description of the updates that have happened since it's first beta. Give it a shot.

Everyone complains about WMP on PPC or SP; but I love it. It does everything I need, sure it uses a lot of ram, but if I'm just listening to music, do I need it to do anything thing else?

All my music is mp4a. WMP won't stream mp4a out an A2DP connection.

I refuse to buy music from iTunes, so I don't have that problem

Yeah, but mine's got album art that gets displayed by CorePlayer

Does CorePlayer support AVRCP?

I use PocketPlayer to listen to music from the SD card without problem, although the interface can be a little 'laggy'. It plays gapless .ogg vorbis files so that is a major boon. I've tried PocketMusic which claims to have gapless but doesn't work correctly. WM10 is just too much of a pain in the ass when trying to load music, and has no EQ etc.
I do use WM10 for watching movies though (until Coreplayer gets divx/xvid support for the TyTN that is!). I have been playing mp4 films with some degree of success, however if I pause the film at any time the Audio disappears. I need to restart WM10 to get it working again. Very annoying!

My T-Mobile VARIO II together with Windows Media 11 and HP Bluetooth Stereo Headset (well I know there are better ones)
A Golden combination.
Stereo music easy sync and the best the Album art is also included when you sync via the Windows Media. Also I am using the Windows Media today plugin which was published somewhere here in the Hermes forum (it comes from the iMATE ROM) Perfect!!!!!!!!
The Windows Media Player eats up a lot of memory but I do not complain, even with other things running I seldom see my device having less than 17 MB of program memory .
A2DP and AVRCP work a treat without any tweaks.
For me Microsoft Rules!
And in regards to Apple, well I find it ancient that you have to convert files to different format if you want to use the songs on more devices. I mean guys if I rip my CD into iTunes then this is it only the iPOD can use it.
Anyhow when Zune is there then I am afraid Apple can kiss their arses goodbuy in regards to jhaving the majority of the market in hands.
P.S. BTW I also use my QTEK 8500 in the same setting and that is even more sweet then VARIO II because you can see everything without opening the device.

Sleuth,
WMP displays album art for all of my mp3's and wma's as well.
Churchill,
As much as I'd love to agree with you and see the Ipod get taken down by the Zune, I think it will be a cold day down south before that ever happens. Tech analysts the world around are predicting the Zune to be the biggest failure of Microsoft's ventures, ever. I hope I'm wrong, but as much as I hate the proprietary nature of Apple's music platform, the sheer style of the Ipod, IMHO, cannot be beat. And the new full touchscreen Ipod that is coming out will just re-solidify that.
Anyway, sorry to hijack... this thread is about Windows Media Player

stpete111!
I totally agree with you about the styling of the ipods, but as they say "looks might be deceiving" I mean Of course looks are important but if because of it I have to have less functionality or incovenience, man I would walk around with a brick around my neck

I agree totally. I'll just bet though that very few of the people that the Ipod has reeled in since 2001 will be pulled away from it by the Zune.

You should have had another choice for "don't use PPC for media" or something to that effect... I still say GET AN IPOD!!!!

I really think I'm the only one who absolutely hates everything that is Apple...

stpete111 said:
Sleuth,
WMP displays album art for all of my mp3's and wma's as well.
Churchill,
As much as I'd love to agree with you and see the Ipod get taken down by the Zune, I think it will be a cold day down south before that ever happens. Tech analysts the world around are predicting the Zune to be the biggest failure of Microsoft's ventures, ever. I hope I'm wrong, but as much as I hate the proprietary nature of Apple's music platform, the sheer style of the Ipod, IMHO, cannot be beat. And the new full touchscreen Ipod that is coming out will just re-solidify that.
Anyway, sorry to hijack... this thread is about Windows Media Player
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I owned an ipod briefly and was so disappointed with the sound quality I took it back to the shop for a refund. I did some research and settled on iRiver in the end. Far better sound quality and styling than the ipod IMO.
I also personally don't think Zune will be a failure... People said xbox would be a failure, and to some degree it was (I read in the press they lost millions on it) but as that's just pocket change to Micro$oft they just come back again with something bigger and better, e.g. the xbox 360. And boy what a device that is. If the Zune loses money they'll just go back to the drawing board and make it better until it becomes a success. That's the great thing about having a bottomless pit of money.
I actually think the Zune sounds like a great device so far anyway - and with the Wifi option to share music with other people, how can they go wrong? Assuming they don't DRM sharing music files somehow. If they do some clever bugger will just create some custom firmware for it anyway... guess we'll have to wait and see!

darkjedi said:
I really think I'm the only one who absolutely hates everything that is Apple...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're probably right!

Until iTunes runs on PPC (which I don't see happening anytime soon), there is no way I'd give up my iPod -- it simply sounds better and it's easier to use... imagine that!

Darkjedi - you are NOT the only one who hates everything that is Apple. I'm not saying that I hate everything Apple... I used to, then I saw the 24" Intel Core Duo Imac in CompUSA and almost sh** myself. Wow, what a friggin piece of equipment. And don't even get me going on their G5's and rumored Octocore sets coming out. BUT, I know a good number of people that DO hate everything Apple. Anyway, I just hate DRM and proprietary platforms, and while Microsoft bows to the RIAA with DRM just like Apple does, Apple's platform is much more restrictive, in my opinion.
Goesto11 - I definitely cannot argue with the fact that Itunes is about the easiest and best organized app to use for digital media, and, I had an Ipod Shuffle for a few months and I couldn't believe the sound quality coming from that thing. They definitely have that down.
goonerz - just so you know, there will be DRM imposed on the Wi-Fi sharing with the Zune. Once you share a song with someone, they can only listen to it 3 times, then they are given the choice to purchase the track (or more like the DRM key) or it gets deleted. I agree with you totally though, it likely won't be long until that's cracked. I of course would never condone stealing in any shape or form And trust me, if the Zune isn't a failure, I'll be the first to gladly eat my words. I truly hope that it is not.
Sorry, I know this thread has taken a left turn (or a hijack if you will) but I don't care... I love talking about this stuff

I love the look, design, and feel of the Zune, right down to the UI, but DRM is going to CRIPPLE the Zune, and people aren't going to like it at all.

Itunes

I would like Itunes on my HD2 as all my songs are currently in Itunes and don't want to start all over again with windows media player. Is this possible and NO I don't want to go buy an Iphone as my HD2 rules

Jammie_1989 said:
NO I don't want to go buy an Iphone
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Why not?
You seem bent on using a terrible piece of software, why not also a terrible phone?

Try Salling Media Sync
If you want to sync the playlists from the iTunes in your PC with your HD2, then you can go for Salling Media Sync. Its Free

There is also an excellent music/ internet radio player and iTunes sync software called Pocket Tunes costing $20, but available for a 15 day trial.
For the HD2 you'd need an extra 'skin' downloaded for it to work, and some of the menu options are a little less finger friendly as they are designed for stylus use, but still quite usable.
The PC client will sync iTunes files and playlists (though not those with DRM, as that's not allowed by Apple). The demo version won't work with WMA files as Microsoft don't allow that!
We did a review of this on 4WinMobile!, though its not been updated for a while

The only reason for having itunes would be the podcasts but this guy has fixed that for us.
He has converted the itunes xml to html using google appspot. So you can now access itunes store and download podcasts straight to your device. It is not the nicest UI but works on IE Opera and skyfire.
http://app-store.appspot.com
If someone wants to make it all nice and tidy feel free.

the best way to sync your music.

mediamonkey + rsync.
mediamonkey is by far the best and most robust batch id3 editor, converter, re-organizer, etc i've used.
unfortunately the sync kinda sucks with my N1. it has limited features (no ability to remove files from the N1 if you remove them from your library or move the folders around, etc)
enter: rsync (or grsync if you want a gui or are on windows)
usually what I do is on getting new music i'll add the music to mediamonkey (not the library just yet), then use the converter to lower the bitrate to 128kbps (i have a ton of music and don't mind sacrificing the barely noticeable quality difference for more space) and normalize the volume and re-organize them into /library/artist/album/track-title.mp3
then i'll rsync /android/Music with /library and voila.
note: i hated doubletwist. i did not have itunes and doubletwist wouldn't edit any of my mp3 tags. plus it was laggy and heavy.
sidebar: people hate on the android music player. its fantastic search function (partial searches ftw! i can search for "op orld" and it'll find "drop the world".) is indispensable.

I just dump everything into a folder on my SD card while it is mounted to my computer

Salling Media Sync
SC

This message was deleted by its author

copy all works fine, but takes a long time if you have a large sdcard and library. unless you copy to the same folder and select to not overwrite existing files, but then you don't get updates that you make on your desktop and this could lead to duplicate files, etc.
rsync does incremental updates (only sends what's been changed) and has an option to delete files from the destination folder if they're not present in the source folder.
both Salling and DoubleTwist require an iTunes library, don't they? DoubleTwist was absolutely terrible for managing my library when i tried it. it read some 2,500 mp3s and read the metadata for maybe 20% of them, and left the others as just the filenames. that was shocking to me. Salling does require iTunes, and i dislike itunes a good bit.

you onlyneed itunes to convert files to a usable format. ie, AVI to MP4 etc

mediamonkey for me too, its great for fixing up tags and getting cover art.
There are some ipods in our house, mediamonkey syncs those too as well as various other devices.

t4tav said:
Doubletwist
Personally I can't fault it
Plus T-Mobile are thinking of partnering with them to ship it with "select" Android phones
How about Banshee ?
Above is Linux only :/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yup, double twist in partnership for tmobile is out.
http://apps.t-mobile.com/doubletwist/
worth noting that it doesnt have the amazon mp3 store in it.

t4tav said:
Doubletwist
How about Banshee ?
Above is Linux only :/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Actually, Banshee is available for Linux, Windows and OS X. The version released yesterday is supposed to include direct support for the Nexus One. Although when they advertised G1 support, it actually didn't work. They admitted that it didn't work when pressed and continued to advertise G1 support. It's not a terribly great player, but if I can drag and drop to my Nexus One AND transfer playlists appropriately, then I'll use it for that, but it doesn't really work too well for library management.

What Software and App work together? on Linux?
Doubletwist (Music,Videos,Podcasts,Playlists) does the job perfectly on windows and mac... but what about linux?
Banshee seems really good same as doubletwist except it puts everything into one folder it looks like. Music and Podcasts mix together with any app on my android device. Doubletwist had its own app which made it work correctly putting each media class into its own folder on the android device. Music=music podcasts=podcasts I used it all the time. Now I run only linux and would like something just as good.
App on LINUX laptop and App on device working together! Anyone have ideas? or at least a way to get banshee to put music in a specific folder on my android device and podcasts in another that I decide. If so I can just continue to use doubletwist app on android.
Please anyone with a solution?

I really thought you could get doubletwist on Linux.

I've been using rythmbox on linux. Its kind of a pain to sync playlists, and it took me forever to figure it out, but I hate banshee and I couldnt find anything else that works.

drewzee said:
I've been using rythmbox on linux. Its kind of a pain to sync playlists, and it took me forever to figure it out, but I hate banshee and I couldnt find anything else that works.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
drewzee does rythmbox have an android app? like doubletwist? so they talk pc to android.

winamp is nice, but the wireless sync needs to be fixed so it can directly send to sd card into a certain folder. Having 100s of artist folders on the main directory is annoying

I wish we could get the Zune software to work with android. :/

Previously, I was running rsync over ssh with Tasker to sync my music (and backup my SD) with my server
Since the command can sometimes take a while to execute (a new nand or several new albums etc) and there isnt any verbose output using Tasker, I just created a script that i can easily execute from BTEP and my music and other data are synced. this works for me

smot13 said:
I wish we could get the Zune software to work with android. :/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes yes yes!! And that it worked on linux! I know its too much to ask for.
Sent from my SPH-D700 using XDA App

pwig said:
I really thought you could get doubletwist on Linux.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have been trying to get doubletwist to work through wine. No luck. Got installed but it won't run. I'm using fedora 14 32bit. On dell xps1330. I'm more of an ubuntu user but need fedora for work.
Sent from my SPH-D700 using XDA App

Why even sync it?
Audiogalaxy FTW

ErlyD said:
drewzee does rythmbox have an android app? like doubletwist? so they talk pc to android.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Im not sure what you mean because I've never used doubletwist, but the nexus will show up in the side pane of rhythmbox. You can right click, and then decide which playlists you want to sync etc...
The reason why I said it was a pain figuring out, is because the "My Top Rated" playlist would not update on my phone when I added new songs to it. I found out after tinkering that in order for that specific playlist to update, I had to delete the .pls file from the sd card before syncing it.

iTunes and HD2

Just did a search on the forum and noticed that no one had mentioned iTunes Agent (http://ita.sourceforge.net/).
"iTunes Agent is a tiny application which rests in your system tray, constantly looking for devices being connected to your system. If a device it recognizes is connected it enables you to manage it via a playlist in iTunes. You may even associate your player with a Smart Playlist, such as "Party Shuffle", and always have a new collection of tracks on your player!
When you are done modifying the list of tracks for your player you can synchronize it with two small mouse-clicks!"
I thought it was good to mention as i have a itunes server service which i use for music and also a ipod touch and keeping them all in sync inc HD2 and any other device is very handy.

http://www.binaryfortress.com/itunes-sync/
This does a similar sort of thing, doesnt need to start with windows and hide in your tray though!

itunes and HTC HD2
Can itunes be downloaded and purchase the songs, games, and music on the
windows os? Are the games scaled to work on the HTC HD2? If so, how do you do this?

nuke1201 said:
Can itunes be downloaded and purchase the songs, games, and music on the
windows os? Are the games scaled to work on the HTC HD2? If so, how do you do this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
music will work videos might work and games defiantly wont work at all.

itunes sync
Found a very good free app (doubletwist) that syncronizes itunes / iphoto/ video libraries between the Mac and any storage device. I have been using it on the HTC HD2 for a week and it syncs all the playlists from itunes and even photos and videos. it is linked to amazon music store and content can be downloaded directly. The interface is just like itunes and seems very very easy to use...just select your device from the panel, select playlists and click sync....all the playlists created get recognised by the HTC sense media player.. google doubletwist and download ...and you are all set.....

doubletwist
doesn't work for me. my hd2 is running windows mobile 6.5 and while the app recognizes my device after it's plugged into my computer and also sees the itunes files and playlists, nothing shows up after the supposed sync takes place.

Interested in such an app for my HD2 on WM 6.5
Tried Itunes agent, not really user friendly and didnt manage to add my HD2 on it.
Ive got loads on myusic on itunes, would like to put one of my playlist songs (around 500 mbs of music) on my HD2.. is there a simple way? Copying items from itunes doesnt seem to work.. and there is a mix of MP3 files and AAC files... will they read allright on HD2?

If they where bought from the iTunes store..and no explicitly DRM free, then no, they will not work no matter how you copy them to your device.

which is the best app for sync my xperia with itune?

i had ipod touch and now i want to sync all my music(and playlists) on my xperia x10. i found some programs like tynesync lite and another one like an itun for androind on my windows. the one is creating the playlist as i wont put it import only 20 tracks in each playlists. the other program is trasfering only the tracks and is not grating the playlists. is there any other applications which creates playlists and import in them more than 20 songs?

Mod. edit: not (yet) t&a related, moved to general

Just use pc campanion(its preinstalled to your sd card).

Hiya,
I use an app called Isyncr...
It copies an itunes playlist of your choice over to your sd card (and therefore mediascape)!!

charmz2k2 said:
Hiya,
I use an app called Isyncr...
It copies an itunes playlist of your choice over to your sd card (and therefore mediascape)!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
mediascpae can only sync 20 tracks per playlist? if yes is there any way to increase this issue?

Try DoubleTwist, it's actually made for syncing itunes and android.
It also has other sync functions likeictures,video,music,subscriptions and also has android marketplace.
(im apparently not allowed to post links :S, anyway just google and you will find it)

IceBre4ker said:
Try DoubleTwist, it's actually made for syncing itunes and android.
It also has other sync functions likeictures,video,music,subscriptions and also has android marketplace.
(im apparently not allowed to post links :S, anyway just google and you will find it)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i used it but is transfering only the songs that are in playlist without the playlists

Engadget put up an article about an Android app which claims to sync with iTunes on Windows and OSX. It's free for a limited time while it's in beta it seems. It looks like a capable client. It's called DoubleTwist.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/03/android-upgrades-itself-with-doubletwist-media-player-app/
Edit: Missed IceBre4ker post. Oh boy.

interesting post.
After viewing the google I/O keynote and all the hoo haa about froyo, there is an over the air sync on froyo where you can actually play your media files on your home computer via your 3G or wifi. Is there an app for that right now?
Doubletwist and the like seem to only work when the USB is connected. The over the air streaming app would provide the ultimate music experience as my music collection is over 80 GB.
Froyo will take forever to be released for our device. A cooked rom might suffice, but until that time, an app would really help us out here.