Music Players - Part Three
April 9th, 2009 adminMost phones (regular or smartphones) that you buy come with some sort of music player. These music players typically work for a majority of the population. Then there are the people like me that want to see what all the options available are…
So I bring you a review of some of the FREE music players that are available on the internet – in all three categories – Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry.
(Remember: What you see below is just my opinion. I encourage everyone reading this to try out all the options and make an informed decision for themselves!)
For part 3 of my “Music Player” series I will cover a few programs for Palm OS.
Palm OS: Options available – RealPlayer, TCPMP, and The Magic Lantern.
RealPlayer
Realplayer is definitely a great all around basic mp3 player for Palm. It scans your memory card for MP3 files and plays them through a simple interface.
I used this as my player on my old Treo 600, and it came standard with the Treo 650. It has since been replaced with Pocket Tunes on all newer models - Mainly for the ability to do things like create playlists, and connect to internet radio.
If what you are looking for is a small lightweight program to play a few songs then this is the program for you.
TCPMP
TCPMP is one of the most powerful programs for Palm OS. Not only will it play MP3s, but it will play: AC3, HE-AAC, AMR, DivX, FLAC, H.263, H.264, JPEG, Monkey’s Audio, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MP2, MP3, Musepack, MS-MPEG4-v3, PNG, Speex, TIFF, TTA, Vorbis, WAV, WavPack and XviD. It also supports many container formats, including 3GP, ASF, AVI, Matroska, MPEG, OGG, OGM and QuickTime. This makes it a multimedia player that can handle almost any program thrown at it.
It does have one major flaw. The program has officially been discontinued for a non-free commercial version. The final version (see link below) is definitely stable enough to be used on a regular basis. I have used the program to speed read audio books (it has the capability to spped up audio and video files), I have also watched full length movies on it (American Psycho, in fact).
In my opinion this is a must have application.
(from Wikipedia)
The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) is a software media player. Supported operating systems include Windows, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Palm OS and Symbian OS. It is not to be confused with The Core Media Player, a different media player. TCPMP also has hardware accelerated playback for ATI and Intel 2700g mobiles, such as the Tapwave Zodiac and Dell Axim X50v/X51V.
Although development of the free version of the software has been discontinued by CoreCodec in favour of the commercially-licensed CorePlayer, TCPMP is still regarded as one of the more versatile media player for PocketPC and Palm OS mobile devices. It has been described as “the best, free multimedia player for both the Pocket PC and the Palm OS platform” by a reviewer for Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine.[1]
Honorable Mention - The Magic Lantern
Honestly I know very little about this application. I have seen it listed on multiple sites, and all without a screenshot. I installed it, and had a hard time with it rebooting my phone, so I am not sure if I had an issue with configuration, or a bad program file… I would love to hear more information about this program because it appears to be a promising one!
Overall Winner: TCPMP
RealPlayer can be downloaded from:
https://www.real.com/realcom/palmVersionRedirect?palmVersion=1.6.0
TCPMP can be downloaded from:
http://picard.exceed.hu/tcpmp/test/tcpmp.palmos.0.72RC1.zip
The Magic Lantern can be downloaded from:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=126700&package_id=139855&release_id=319055
