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Remote Media Controllers for Windows Mobile - the Definitive Roundup

Do you use your desktop Windows PC, Mac or Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) desktop computer to play back music or videos? Would you like to be able to remote control the playback from your Pocket PC like on an infrared remote controller unit? Don't you like the idea of purchasing another hardware remote controller for the PC to be able to do this, even when this only means a new sound- or video card with a dedicated hardware infrared remote controller? You don't want to use short-range infared controllers where line-of-sight is a must but, for example, would like to control your equipment from anywhere of your house through, for example, your Wi-Fi wireless network? For example, you're sitting in the kitchen and would like to make the desktop computer-controlled speakers in the kitchen a bit louder or temporarily switch off the music because you have an incoming call? It's just a screentap in your Windows Mobile-based handheld device. Now, imagine what you would need to do without having any kind of a remote control facility - you'd need to go to your (MCE) PC and there do what you need.
Interested? Read on - you'll certainly find this roundup highly useful!
There are two main kinds of Windows Mobile -> desktop PC remote control applications: full-fledged desktop access applications (VNC, TSC, RDP, LogMeIn etc.) and strictly multimedia control applications. As far as the former are concerned, I've thoroughly reviewed all the, on Windows Mobile, available solutions in the Remote Desktop Access Bible. You will NOT want to use these applications to control your media players - there are much better, multimedia-specific applications for this task. There is simply no point in using a fully-fledged, full desktop controller application for multimedia control.
Note that there is a third class of Windows Mobile remote control applications; that of "simple" infrared (IR) remote controller applications I've reviewed in the Infrared Remote Control Bible. As they don't have many of the advantages (for example, lack of need for line of sight; the lack of heavy dependence on the CPU type - most titles don't support the TI and the Samsung CPU's - and the quality / range of the built-in infrared unit; the lack of one-way control only etc.) of the "real" multimedia remote controller (MMRC for short) apps and the only real point of using them is controlling "non-smart" audiovisual devices like stand-alone DVD players and amplifiers, I don't pay any attention to them in this review. Please make sure you do check out the above-linked review for more information on them.
Note that there're some other, similar, but desktop-only roundups; see for example this German language Wiki entry for some additional, desktop-side apps.
1.1 What can you control?
With all the reviewed (available) MMRC apps,
you can control, at least, the basic functionality of the desktop-side player; that is, Stop / Start / Next title / Previous title / Pause and the volume slider.
you see (at least - with more advanced remote controllers, you also see the album art or even the lyrics of) the title and artist of the current title (particularly if it has a filename already conveying this information - the simplest applications only display the filename of the currently played title or, in very few cases - see for example PPC Tablet Remote Control Suite - don't display anything, not even the filename.)
some kind of a playlist; if not your desktop-side, pre-created and automatic playlists (as is the case with for example WMP), then, at least, a local playlist you can create on your PDA my individually adding arbitrary titles to the "Now Playing" list. Note that very few titles lack this functionality; a notable example of these is the free and not really recommended SnowCrash.
one or some desktop-side multimedia player. In most cases, it's Windows Media Player 9 or later (WMP for short). The second most widely supported player is the well-known WinAmp and the third is Apple's iTunes. Very few MMRC apps support other players or other applications like Microsoft PowerPoint. Support for the latter may turn out to be pretty useful if you plan to control your PowerPoint show from your Windows Mobile handheld.
With most players, there are a lot of additional goodies they offer to the user; in the next section, I list them.
1.2 Two-way communication
As opposed to most "standard" IR controllers, PDA's have a display on their own. This means they will at least display the file name of the currently played title and some kind of a song list, from where you can see what the next song is. This means you don't have to see on the desktop PC's screen what the next song will be. Again, imagine your controlling multimedia playback from your kitchen, even some 30-40 metres away from your desktop computer - you see the advantages of this, don't you?
In addition to the next / previous title (file)names, most of them also offer at least desktop playlist download and, with most titles, editing / synchronizing back; with many titles you can also get the details of the songs and, with very few of them, even the lyrics, the aditional ("ID3") information embedded in the file and the album art (when available).
Note that it's in the "Explanation for the comparison chart" section that I explain most of the advanced functionalities and capabilities the MMRC apps offer/have.
1.3 Connectivity
At the beginning of this roundup, I've quickly mentioned a scenario where a Windows Mobile-based media control through Wi-Fi may be highly useful. In this section, I elaborate on in what ways (using what kinds of (wireless) connections) you can remotely control a media player on a desktop computer.
First, there are two main ways you can connect your Windows Mobile device to your desktop computer. One of them is either native or serial Bluetooth support (supported by very few MMRC apps), the other is the widely supported, well-known TCP/IP like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth Personal Area Network (PAN).
Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages.
1.3.1 Native or serial Bluetooth apps
require almost no manual configuration (and are, therefore, generally better for a Windows Mobile beginner - no manual connection establishments, no manual desktop IP entering) and, generally,
work on crippled Bluetooth stacks like that of Microsoft. (Why crippled, you may ask. Because, as far as our case is concerned, it doesn't support BT PAN.) Also,
Bluetooth units built into PDA's consume far less power than Wi-Fi units, the other choice for "full" TCP/IP-based remote control
As far as the disadvantages are concerned,
their range is limited (at least compared to Wi-Fi-based solutions),
some of the "full" TCP/IP apps support multicasting to automatically find controllable desktops on the local network, making it unnecessary for the end user to enter any local desktop IP. Also, peer-to-peer (for example, BT PAN) IP addresses remain the same all the time and don't need to be re-entered with most MMRC's. In this respect, the "no setup needed" advantage of BT easily vanishes.
in cases, they only work with a given pair of BT stacks and are incompatible with the other stacks (see the example of jaylee.org’s Bluetooth Remote Control for Windows Mobile) and
very few titles do support this type of connection.

1.3.2 TCP/IP connectivity
As far as "full" TCP/IP connections are concerned, there are two main connectivity types you'll want to consider using: Bluetooth (BT) Personal Area Network (PAN for short) and Wi-Fi. The latter can use both p2p (peer-to-peer) and infrastructure mode (via a traditional access point anywhere in your house). Let's take a look at the (dis)advantages of each solution.
1.3.2.1 Bluetooth PAN, when compared to Wi-Fi, has the following advantages:
It, generally, consumes far less power than Wi-Fi, meaning much better handheld battery life
It uses at least an order of magnitude less radio power, which may be an issue if you constantly keep your PDA in your hand and you're afraid of the effects of the constant radiation
On the other hand,
it is not compatible with some major Windows Mobile Bluetooth implementations; most importantly, that of Microsoft. This is because the MS BT stack doesn't really support true BT PAN, not even in WM5 AKU3 / WM6, as has also been explained in the AKU3 Networking Bible. This means you can only make use of BT PAN on, say, a current Windows Mobile phone (which, generally, except for some rare exceptions like the, in this regard, excellent Fujitsu-Siemens T830, run the Microsoft BT stack as opposed to that of the much superior and BT PAN-capable Widcomm/ Broadcom) if and only if you manually install the Widcomm BT stack on it and disable the original Microsoft one. This is not likely what you really want to do in some cases, particularly if you plan to use your phone with an external Bluetooth headset and / or as a Bluetooth modem, because, as of now, no "hacked" Windows Mobile phone models have decent support for external headsets or dial-up modems. If the Widcomm BT stack runs on them at all, that is - for example, currently, it doesn't run on the HTC Trinity (P3600), "only" on the Universal, Wizard and TyTN, as far as the most common models are concerned.
while Wi-Fi supports auto reconnection (when you power up your Windows Mobile automatically reconnects to the last access point or, in p2p mode, other computer it was connected to), BT PAN must be manually reconnected. The latter may require several screen taps.
as it requires a direct connection between the desktop PC and the Windows Mobile device, it has much more limited range. Effectively, you'll be only able to remote control your media desktop in the same room. With Wi-Fi, particularly when you control your desktop with a Windows Mobile device connected to the Internet via an Access Point, you can control your desktop from anywhere, even several rooms away from your desktop (remember the example of the kitchen?)
1.3.2.2 Wi-Fi
Finally, Wi-Fi. In our case, there are two kinds of Wi-Fi connections you can consider: a direct (peer-to-peer) connection between the desktop and your Windows Mobile device (this is a bit more complicated to set up at first, requires native Wi-Fi support in the desktop (which, particularly with desktop - non-notebook - computers, not always the case) and has less range) and full infrastructure-based connections (without a direct Wi-Fi p2p connection between your desktop and Windows Mobile device). This means you may want to prefer infrastructure-based connections in most cases, particularly when range is an issue. (An access point is closer to you and your Windows Mobile device than the desktop in your particular remote control setup.)
Please note that I've thoroughly elaborated on all of these questions in the Windows Mobile Multiplayer Games Bible. It's also there that I've linked in my BT PAN, Wi-Fi P2P and BT serial tutorials - please make sure you DO read them if you want to use any of these three techniques to get your Windows Mobile device connected to your desktop.
1.4 Two main types of control: Web-based access and native Windows Mobile clients
There are two main kinds of MMRC apps. The first group offers Web-based access from, in general, any Web browser running on almost any kind of the client (which, therefore, can even be a "dumb", albeit still Web-capable client like a low-end mobile phone); the second uses a native, dedicated Windows Mobile client running on the client device.
Let’s see the advantages / disadvantages of the Web-based solution compared to the native one! The advantages:
You can use it without installing anything on your Windows Mobile device (if you hate installing anything on your device OR it's restricted / blocked in some way)
It's platform-independent. This means it can be used from any kind of a Web-capable client device. Furthermore, this also means the user interface on these different clients will exactly be the same (except for some platform-specific skins applied by the server). The latter has several advantages: most importantly, it'll be sufficient to learn how the GUI must be operated (for example, how desktop-side playlists can be accessed / edited etc) only once; after that, you don't need to learn a completely different GUI because you, for example, need to switch to a completely different MMRC product when you switch client platforms (from Windows Mobile to, say, Symbian, Palm, Linux or even a UMPC) - you can keep using the old, already-familiar one because it supports clients running on any client platforms.
The disadvantages:
They are, generally, considerably slower than native solutions. In some cases (see for example the commercial PlayerPal) this isn't really a problem, in some other cases (see for example the speed difference between the Xlobby clients), it is.
Even more importantly, because of the restricted and non-dynamic standard HTML controls (widgets), you can't for example have a simple volume slider to control the volume. You'll most likely have two buttons or a drop-down volume list to control your volume. The same stands for quickly seeking into a song - with some Web-based clients, it's plain impossible, while it's supported by most (but not all) native clients.
As there are several factors to consider when decidin between the two types of architectures, it's up to you to decide which way to go. Because of the severe restrictions and, generally, lower speed of Web-based MMRC applications, I'd go with native ones, but YOUR decision is up to you.
Note that there are MMRC apps that belong to both categories; that is, they have both a Web-based client and a native one (I recommend the latter for the greatly enhanced speed). Now, the only example of this is the free, excellent Xlobby; this may change in the future.
1.5 What multimedia remote applications are there?
Note that this section is pretty short - it's in the Comparison Chart (and in the explanations it's followed by) that you find most information on all titles. In here, I only give a very short introduction (except for the hard-to-configure and two-mode Xlobby) and link in Windows Mobile-related user forums, articles and reviews that may be worth checking out for more information (in addition to the information contained in the Comparison Chart, that is). In addition to the app-specific thread links, I also recommend these comparisons and this thread.
Note that I don't give you ANY definite "pick" - that is, there is no "most recommended" MMRC application. While there are some very nice titles (1-2-Remote, NetRemote2, Salling Clicker, Xlobby, PPCTablet (if you also need the additional functionality and prefer an all-in-one app) etc.), you have to thoroughly compare the advantages and disadvantages of each application yourself, using my feature / comparison chart and make a decision based strictly on your particular needs. It's just not possible to answer the question "which one is the best" without knowing your needs; for example, whether you need lyrics support or not. There is no "best" application that would have all the features all the alternative MMRC apps have, unfortunately - you'll need to make compromises.
1.5.1 Salling Clicker 3.0.1
This title is pretty remarkable in that it not only allows for controlling Windows, but also Mac-based desktops. Also, it's one of the few titles to support PowerPoint and a number of other desktop-side multimedia players and is also scriptable.
More user reviews here; note that early versions did have problems with BT reactivation; with the current one, I haven't run into problems like these.

1.5.2 Xlobby build 08/01/2006
This title is a very widely known and, what is more, free (!) desktop-based multimedia control center. It has two remote client access modes: via the Web and via a native Windows Mobile client.
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
(click HERE for a much larger, UXGA-resolution version of this)
I've written a short tutorial on how it needs to be configured because the tutorial coming with the program is far from perfect and you'd need to read a lot of threads in the official forum to find REAL answers to your Windows Mobile-related questions, even at just the setup / configuration phase. This way, I save you a lot of time and effort.
As has already been explained, this title is unique in that it has no less than two remote control modes: a Web server listening at port 8002 and a non-Web server at port 8000. These must be individually enabled when needed. To start the Web server, press F2 in the main program, select Xnet and then click Start Web Server. To start the non-Web server, click "Start Server" at the top
As has been pointed out, you'll want to prefer the non-web server access: this is the recommended way of communication because it's much faster than the browser-based one.
Starting and using the native PPC client (also see this thread):
\Program Files\xlobby\client\xlobby2sd.exe and servers.txt must be transferred to the PDA; the latter after editing: at least changing server address, which is 192.168.1.100 by default (note that it's, while similar to the pre-WM5 desktop ActiveSync IP address, 192.168.55.100, not exactly the same) to the real, current one.
Web-based access:
Password-protected, the default username is empty and the password is xlobby123. This information must be filled into the client-side Web browser like in here (a quick note: if you enter the wrong password or give a username, you'll be redirected to this funny page)
Note that the web server just returns 40…80 kbyte-long images (as an ISMAP map) during the communication; that is, no client-side processing takes place. This also means it'll run in even the worst, least capable browser (but still capable of image map handling). This also means the Web browser-based interface is exactly the same as that of the desktop - as is the case with the native Pocket PC client, which, essentially, also uses GUI images to communicate.
Other setup notes and hacks for Xlobby
Unfortunately, on my notebook, it crashed when I've tried to supply a music path to it, no matter what music I've tried to import (it had no problems with other kinds of multimedia stuff). Fortunately, simply editing \Program Files\xlobby\ databases\music.xml and changing <paths /> to
<paths>
<path>d:\path1</path>
<path>d:\ path2</path>
</paths>
worked just great as can be seen in this screenshot showing importing the music files from the path supplied this way. Note that you can supply any number of paths in here; in the above example, I've supplied two.
Also see this and this for a Pocket PC-related discussion. The (pretty good) forum of Xlobby is here; the generic subforum here and the documentation here.
1.5.3 PlayerPal 4.2 sr1
This is a strictly Web-based solution. While it's clearly better than the other, strictly Web-based title, SnowCrash, I don' really recommend it unless you REALLY need a web-based MMRC application for the reasons I've outlined in the Web-based vs. native client section. Also see this thread.
1.5.4 Proximis NetRemote2 2.00.00.86
This is a highly recommended, albeit really expensive all-in-one remote control suite. You will seriously want to consider the advantages and unique features of this title to find out whether you really need them or you can go with an, in general (there are exceptions in some areas like lyrics or remote playlist editing support!) less featureful, but also much cheaper alternatives.
First, it has an infrared remote controller built-in (reviewed in my infrared roundup), which is pretty powerful and good (albeit doesn't support two of the most widely used CPU types of today: that of TI (the HTC Wizard, P3300 etc.) and Samsung (HTC TyTN, P3600 / Trinity etc.)). What is more important, it supports remote controlling / scripting via Girder, probably the most important and widely supported remote control scripting solution for Windows. Note that it also has a barebone Web browser client built-in. It's really barebone though - I wouldn't pay a penny more just for this "feature".
If you do need an IR remote controller (again and again, it is NOT compatible with a lot of current Windows Mobile phones, unlike with some competing products!) and/or Girder support, give this title a definite try. Otherwise, if you are absolutely sure you won't ever need them, look for something cheaper (which, in cases, are far more feature- & powerful - see for example 1-2-Remote.)
Note that it's only lately that the Proximis folks have unified their, previously, three different, separate clients. This is why a lot of sources are still referring to a separate infrared / media controller in addition to the Girder one. Keep this in mind while Googling or checking the forums for more information.
More information & user opinions here, here and here. Official forums here and here; the latter with also WM-specific information. A comparatively old (2004) review can be found here.
1.5.5 Rudeo 1.5.13
This title was pretty famous and popular in the past; for example, it even won some Pocket PC & Smartphone Magazine Best Software Awards in its category. I'd say those times are well over: currently, there are far stronger alternatives on the scene. A desktop server screenshot here.
1.5.6 Zerama Remote 4.2.1
This title was also pretty famous in the past. I'd too say there are better alternatives out there now.
Note that this title requires the .NET framework 1.1; the dialog presented upon install takes you to the 2.0 download, which isn’t the right one. You must acquire the 1.1 framework from here instead.
1.5.7 Kiwisrus / CRPSoft Pocket Media Control 1.0 b42
If you're looking for a strictly free solution and you can live with the restrictions of this title, make sure you check it out.
Also see this and Akheron’s thread for more info / user opinions. Note that, as far as old links and sources are concerned, the original homepage is no longer accessible; web.archive.org has a mirror (with the online tutorials), but without downloads. freewareppc.com links this (non-anymore-working) download; pocketpcfreewares.com doesn’t have a copy. This means you'll need to use the above-linked PDAGold software archive for getting this title.

1.5.8 RemoteAmp 2.0
A pretty capable client - as long as you don't need WMP support.
Also see this thread and this 3.0 betatest announcement.
1.5.9 1-2-Remote by SFR Software 1.1.0
This title is one of my recommended picks because of its being snappy, nice-looking, supporting remote playlist editing and lyrics display.
There's a German language review here.
1.5.10 AwoX Media CTRL for Pocket PC 1.1
This is one of the titles I recommend the least because of its high price, restricted capabilities and, last but not least, the developer's not supporting it any more: the Media CTRL homepage of AwoX doesn’t list the PPC version anywhere and the last, 1.1 version was released in 2004.
Note that, should you REALLY want to buy it (I, again, don't recommend it!), you can get if for much cheaper at Expansys.
1.5.11 A&A Computer Services’ PPC Tablet Remote Control Suite 4.0
This is a pretty unique title in that it not only supports "plain" multimedia control, but also (pretty bad - see the already-linked Remote Desktop Control Bible) remote desktop control and support for many other desktop applications, in addition to using the PDA touchscreen as an input tablet / mouse for the desktop.
Unfortunately, as far as strictly multimedia control is concerned, it does have its share of problems (for example, the lack of seeking or any kind of local feedback); this is why I can't recommend it for strictly multimedia control, only if you do need its other capabilities and features (most importantly, the really unique tablet capabilities - again, its desktop controlling module is far from perfect.)
1.5.12 jaylee.org’s Bluetooth Remote Control for Windows Mobile 0.6.0
(Other screenshots: finding devices 1 2)
This free application is unique in that it relies on (strictly) native Bluetooth connections, with all its advantages and disadvantages. This means if both your Windows Mobile device and your desktop uses the Microsoft BT stack AND the restrictions of Bluetooth (for example, the limited range) aren't a problem, you may definitely want to give this title a try.
Note that \Program Files\ Orion\ Bluetooth Remote Control\ BTRemoteServer.exe must be manually started on the desktop in order to start the server.

1.5.13 Vinyl 1.0
This discontinued (the old homepage is no longer directly accessible (web.archive.org mirror available here)), free (it was made free in 2004) player may be a good choice for you if and only if you have a Windows Mobile device with an operating system prior to WM5. Unfortunately, it's not compliant with WM5 or WM6.
See THIS for a review.
1.5.14 SnowCrash 2.03
(a screenshot of running it in the desktop IE)
This free, Web-based title doesn't have much to write home about. I don't really recommend it.
Tips: Note that, in the docs, the "What Bugs Does Snowcrash Have?" section means the following:
"The roles.cfg file doesn't support * with access level of 1000": this means you MUST supply the full IP address of your client. When operated via BT / Wi-Fi P2P or ActiveSync, this will be the same all the time.
"Unable to display non-mp3 files" doesn't mean for example WMA files can't be played back with it (if they're already in a playlist) or shown by the player; it's just that, when you traverse the drives / directories of your desktop computer right from your client, you will only see MP3 files in a given directory, nothing else.
Also see this thread.
1.6 Not reviewed / disqualified MMRC apps
1.6.1 Tinytechnews' AirTunes! 2.0
(Note that this product should not to be mistaken for Apple's AirTunes. They are completely different products and have nothing to do with each other)
I've disqualified this product because
it's been abandoned back in 2002; it's only on Tucows that I could find it and there isn't absolutely any point in paying for it
it's plain buggy. For example,
if the server doesn't work on the desktop, the client will still stay in the "Loading list"
if you click Play when nothing selected (for example, before you download the title list), you get an index error (this is what I call sloppy programming!)
if you don't supply any media directory to the server running on the desktop, the client will still try to fetch stuff from there. Furthermore, you can only supply one directory to the server, unlike with almost all the other solutions, which require and / or allow for supplying media directories in the local file system.
it seems to have major compatibility issues. For example, it wouldn't work on my WM2003 iPAQ 2210 at all (execution refused with an eVB error). On my WM2003SE Pocket Loox 720, the situation was better; in there, it started but still wouldn't download anything off the server.
Otherwise, it has nothing to write home about either: for example, no TCP/IP multicast discovery, no native or serial BT support, no lyrics / album art / ID tag and, of course, no WMP support.
1.6.2 www.mcmajeres.com' Iremote
This project has been completely abandoned and the original title doesn't seem to be accessible anywhere.
1.6.3 Niveus Pocket Remote 2.0
This title is only compatible with Vista and Windows XP Media Center Edition; this is why I haven't tested it.
1.6.4 Total Input Elite Edition for Pocket PC Version 2.0.6
Doesn't support any MM players out of the box and there are no third-party scripts or plug-ins (unlike with, say, Girder or Xlobby). Furthermore, the project seems to be abandoned - the last update was released four years ago. Therefore, I've disqualified it too.
1.6.5 PuppetMaster
They have just started the development for Windows Mobile; maybe this is why this title simply didn't find my notebook computer from any of my test Pocket PC's.
2. Comparison / feature chart
As with most of my reviews, the bulk of the information, along with some 100 example screenshots of all apps, is in the comparison / feature chart (CLICK THE LINK!!). It's only using a tabular format that the existence (or lack) of a given feature can be quickly identified.
2.1 Explanation for the chart
Supported desktop-side MM players: what multimedia players (and, in cases, other apps like PowerPoint) it's capable of remote controlling.
VGA?: is it compatible with WM2003SE/WM5/WM6 VGA devices? Does it do (ugly) pixel doubling; if it does, can it be "hacked" to be more VGA-friendly?
Requirements?: additional libraries it requires (in most cases, Compact Framework on the Windows Mobile device and in several cases, .NET on the desktop).
Doc quality?: In here, I've elaborated on how useful the official documentation is. I've also linked them in if available online (and not only, say, part of the installation package or the installed application itself). Note that, in here, I haven't listed the quality of the online forum (otherwise, I would have given a much better mark to Xlobby.)

Connectivity group: this is where the real content begins. In this group, I've elaborated on how the given MMRC app connects to the desktop (TCP/IP or serial/native Bluetooth) and, if it uses TCP/IP, does it support passwords (to make it impossible for intruders coming from the external network) and multicast discovery (to make it far easier for Windows Mobile clients to find controllable desktop(s)).
Type: a quick summary of the connection type
If TPC/IP is supported, multicast discovery (incl. true WM5 AS connections, as opposed to (restricted) pre-WM5 ones)): see the above discussion of multicast discovery. Also note that it also works under WM5 / WM6 through plain ActiveSync connections (even over USB ) when operated in the default LAN mode, unlike under previous operating systems, where multicast discovery doesn't work and you must enter the IP address of the desktop PC, 192.168.55.100, into your Windows Mobile client. Please also read this article on the differences between the two networking approaches under WM5 / WM6 if not sure.
(Even remote) IP address w/o multicast discovery?: this is the opposite of multicast discovery: can you directly enter any IP address into the client?
WMP playlists group: WMP supports both manually created and automatic playlists. In this test, I've checked how the tested applications support this functionality.
Does it allow for local playlist creation / editing?: advanced MMRC apps allow for local playlist editing and even creation. This is a hugely useful feature when you prefer editing your playlists from, say, your bed. In here, I've elaborated on this feature, packed with screenshots to give a feel how it's done in practice.
Synchronizing the created / edited playlists back to the desktop?: if you do edit / create your playlists on your Windows Mobile device, you will also want to synchronize them back to your desktop so that they instantly become available for the desktop player too, and not only from the client. In here, I've listed whether automatic resynchronization works flawlessly.
Additional features / goodies group: in here, I've listed the album art, ID3 tags and lyrics support, searching capabilities and equalizer support.
Cover (album art) in the same directory / embedded in the file (if WMP hasn’t already extracted the thumbnail to become a directory-level one)? Does the latter, when supported, override the album-level one with it?:
Basically, there are two ways of storing album arts with a given song OR an album: either posting one art for all the songs in the same album (on the directory level) or embedding an image (or, for that matter, several of them) in the song file itself (see this official Microsoft tutorial explains how you can add album art to a given music title on the latter). Both have advantages and disadvantages and the players' ability to notice and render these images are wildly different, particularly on the Pocket PC.
In addition, some plays make it possible to consider the (alphabetically) first JPG file they run into in the same directory the album art in the same album.
In this test, I've tested whether these images are correctly rendered on the PDA (if at all).
MP3 ID3v1 / ID3v2 Tags?: is the player able to (locally!) display MP3 ID3v1 / ID3v2 tags? (Note that I haven't explicitly tested the ASF (WMA) ID compliance of the players because it's far less widely used than MP3 ID3.)
MP3/WMA tag lyrics support? If yes, synchronized lyrics? Note that WMP only supports tag-based lyrics, not file-based (.txt / .lrc) ones.: Most modern compressed music formats support inline lyrics storage, even at two languages.
Note that not even the latest (11) version of WMP support external LRC and TXT files and its synchronization features only allow for line-based lyrics synchronization, not word-based one (unlike advanced LRC-based lyrics). This means you in no way can achieve for example Karaoke-like effects: on Windows Mobile, you won’t get support for the latter, except for KarPocket and the LRC-compatible Lyrics Magic.
In this test, I've embedded some lyrics in an MP3 file, made sure it's correctly rendered my WMP and, then, tested the applications to see whether they also render them on the Windows Mobile client.
The Genre / Album / Artist etc.-based sorting of the WMP media library on client? If not taken from WMP, does it try to parse the sound file filenames / tags to find out more?: does it also use the Genre / Album / Artist-based sorting of WMP, or, does it discard it and/or try to invent it itself. The latter is a big plus with desktop players that do NOT support (implicit, automatic) Genre / Album / Artist-based sorting.
Video on the desktop PC?: a decent remote controller should be able to remote control video playback. This, unfortunately, isn't so evident as music playback as many players use plug-ins running hidden and, therefore, if you play back videos, they aren't necessarily shown. In this row, I've elaborated on these questions.
Searching for a given title?: a decent MMRC app should make it possible to run (even partial) searches for a given title. Unfortunately, very few of them allow for this.
Battery and desktop friendliness, possible problems and bottlenecks group: especially with clients that are, in cases, up and running for several hours, it's of extreme importance to have as low battery consumption as possible. In addition to selecting the best communication form (preferring Bluetooth to Wi-Fi whenever possible) to achieve this, it's also very important that you use a client that doesn’t use the CPU when it's not necessary.
Unfortunately, many clients scroll the title of the currently played song on the screen of the mobile device, which may result in excess CPU usage all the time, resulting in a heavily decreased battery life (assuming you, otherwise, use a battery-friendly way to communicate; for example, Bluetooth. If you use Wi-Fi, it'll account for the majority of the power consumption and, then, the CPU usage factor won't be that important. That is, the benchmark data given here should only act as a showstopper when deciding for a particular MMRC solution when you otherwise would have excellent battery life, and even 10% CPU usage makes an articulated difference).
In this group, I've examined mostly these questions. Note that with the titles sporting excess CPU usage because of (mostly) the title scrolling, I've also run CPU usage benchmarks when minimized or when switched to dialogs where the scrolling wasn't visible. With titles that, in this case, get rid of the CPU cycle-consuming scrolling algorithm, it may be worth considering always switching to these (mostly setup) dialogs or minimizing the application when it's not strictly needed to achieve (also depending on some other factors; most importantly whether you use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) substantially better results.
I've also paid special attention to the desktop-side server component to see how much memory it consumes and how much CPU time it uses. As you'll see, there are some desktop server components that "go rogue" and consume even hundreds of Megabytes of meagre RAM!
Built-in screen off; if not, is it compatible with system-level button-assigned or Start menu-based tools?: while switching off the screen, unfortunately, has (in most cases) nothing to do with the CPU usage of a given application (that is, an application that has excess CPU usage because it, say, constantly scrolls the title of the song on the local mobile screen won't stop chewing through the battery if you, in some way, power down the screen), it's still nice to know whether it's possible to do this at all with either some kind of a built-in screenoff functionality or a system-level one with, say, assigned to a hardware button. This way, you can also extend the battery life.
Can the PPC (and, therefore, the connection) be suspended while remote controlling?: if you know you surely won't need to control your desktop equipment for some time, can you safely suspend, and, then, later resume your handheld device - that is, can the MMRC app just "pick up" work where you've left it at? Fortunately, all of them can. That is, the playback of the "Now playing" list will not be stopped when you power down your Windows Mobile device.

Desktop-side RAM / CPU usage: while inactive? (If CPU usage isn't explicitly stated, then, it's always very close to 0%) and while active?: as has already been explained, all these MMRC's (except for only one of them, SnowCrash, which is a WinAmp plug-in and not a separate process) run as a separate process. In here, I've checked the memory and the CPU usage of this process while both inactive (there are no connected clients) and active (an active MM control session is in progress). As can clearly be seen, while the CPU usage is negligible with all titles, some expose VERY high memory usage. This may be an issue particularly on memory-constrained desktop computers (mostly notebooks).
Does a huge number of desktop-side songs cause problems?: Some non-optimized MMRC apps may, in cases, cause severe lockups when, say, trying to send a list of 5000 titles to a Pocket PC client. This may be caused by the Web browsers' inability to render larger HTML pages (older versions of Pocket Internet Explorer slow down at documents exceeding 200-300 kbytes (and crash at 400-500 kbytes) even when there are plenty of dynamic RAM memory available) or just the slowness of the engine itself. Fortunately, it's only SnowCrash that suffers from this problem, and only with the default skin. (You MUST change it to a PDA-optimized one - see the mini-tutorial in the "OS compliance" row!)
Controls group: here, I've elaborated on what remote control functionality is supported as far as basic functionalities (stop / start / next / previous and pause buttons and volume sliders / setting capabilities) are concerned (see Basic functionality (stop / start / next / previous / pause / volume)); whether you can freely seek in a song or not (see Freely seeking in a song?) and whether any hardware buttons (including the D-pad) can be utilized on your Windows Mobile device for even faster and/or "blind" access for the most common functions (Any PPC hardware buttons used in addition to D-pad? Is the D-pad utilized?).
Verdict group: this speaks for itself. In here, you get a full list of the most important pros / cons of each and every application and, finally, a some-sentence evaluation. Make sure you check out at least these three rows, if not the full chart!
3. Generic streaming questions
You may also want to know how you can encode and stream something to your PDA, assuming you don't want / can't access network shares to play the files directly on your handheld device, which isn't at all impossible (on the contrary - accessing shared files will work just great over any local TCP/IP network; for example, BT PAN or Wi-Fi, both p2p and not. It's, in general, only with remote (non-local) access that you will be interested in real streaming capabilities -or, with wildly incompatible or non-streamable (for example, some video) formats). Therefore, you will only want to read the rest of this short section if you want to know how streaming can be accomplished.
None of the titles have built-in streaming capabilities; not that it'd be of any problem because there're specialized tools to do the job. Of them, I recommend two free tools: Windows Media Encoder and SlimServer. (Note that there are several other, mostly SHOUTcast-like tools; the usage of most of them are like that of WME. Therefore, in here, I don't elaborate on them - if you understand how WME works with any desktop-side, remote controlled, media player, you will be able to stream using any other tool.)
3.1 Windows Media Encoder
(or any SHOUTcast-alike implementation) will work together with any MMRC application pretty well, based on the fact that you can directly control WHAT song is played back on your desktop with any MMRC app, while the additional streaming software just blindly transfers the currently played track over the wired / wireless connection to your PDA. WME is, streaming-wise, fully compatible with the built-in Pocket Windows Media Player; SHOUTcast-compatible desktop-side encoders, on the other hand, with third-party MP3 streaming / SHOUTcast-compatible clients like GSPlayer.
3.2 SlimServer 6.5.1 by Slim Devices (now: Logitech)
(the same on the desktop PC)
This, otherwise, excellent and very capable title (it fulfills almost every requirements: supports lyrics, album art etc., albeit, as with all the other Web-based clients, it lacks random file seeking support) is strictly for SHOUTcast-compliant streaming with iTunes playlist / database support, not for desktop-side playback remote control. As it uses SHOUTcast to broadcast media, it can prove much more useful to you.
Note that while the Web interface (it's fully Web-ized) promises to have a handheld-optimized version, the "optimized" version, in practice, doesn't differ much from the original version - it still uses frames. Fortunately, the frames can be dynamically resized any time.
Also see this thread on this question.
Comments, feedback, questions, flames are welcome, as usual!
(Cross-posted to: PPCT, MobilitySite, AximSite, BrightHand, FirstLoox, HowardForums, XDA-Dev.

Excellent article as usual Menneisys. Even though I knew about most of these, it was quite refreshing to see them reviewed again.
On another note, is there any PPC app that can basically do 2 things via a Non-Web Interface
1) Search a Remote Computer
2) Browse using a Remote File System (Like the PPC Tablet)
and show hidden and system files and also resort files and folders to display the folders at the top of the list?

valuable information! but you forgot one important thing - memory and CPU usage on the PPC! I don't care at all on my desktop with 3Ghz CPU, 4GB RAM and 500GB HD, but on my PPC with 0.016 times the RAM and 0.00025 times the "HD" size and a CPU slower than the keyboard controller of my desktop...

DoctorT said:
valuable information! but you forgot one important thing - memory and CPU usage on the PPC! I don't care at all on my desktop with 3Ghz CPU, 4GB RAM and 500GB HD, but on my PPC with 0.016 times the RAM and 0.00025 times the "HD" size and a CPU slower than the keyboard controller of my desktop...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
See "CPU usage on client while active" - it "only" lists the CPU usage in %, which is, IMHO, the most important when you run an app in the foreground for, in times, several hours. (This is why I haven't measured the memory usage - I haven't ever run into "shortage of memory" situations on my test devices.)

UPDATE (03/08/2007):
there is a new, beta version of 0.7.0 of the jaylee.org’s Bluetooth Remote Control for Windows Mobile. It, for example, now supports the desktop-side Widcomm BT stack, which is GREAT news!
AirTunes! has turned out to be still supported and having a Web page at http://www.airtunessoftware.com . I'm still awaiting answer to my questions from the developers (if you are one of them, please make sure you read them either in your Webmail mailbox or on my blog as comments); as soon as I get the new version working (so far, I haven't managed to on neither of my desktop PC's), I post a revised review.

Nice summary! But I miss Pebbles.
The software for Windows Mobile has two program files: RemoteCommander and Shortcutter.
While the software isn't very graphically advanced, it allows for a number of interesting control objects: in Shortcutter you can create sliders, rotary buttons, a gesture pad and even a mouse pad.
There is however no interactivity (it only sends keys/commands, it doesn't display information) with the application.
But if all you need is a (free) simple remote control, it really is worth checking out.
Jörg

remoteamp was updated and is now called signal. I've tried all the apps on your list except netremote and signal is by far my favorite. Now it does have WMP support. connects quickly, no wait time for it to sync a database, fast response, etc. I pretty much use it as a remote control now. ONly wish it could do video.

Very interesting and very nicely done write up.
Has a write up ever been done for WM friendly Media Servers, such as ORB? Currently using ORB, was just wondering if there is anything else out there worth looking at.
Having both Remote Media Controller and Media Server services running gives one total control over both the equipment and the digital assets of a HTPC setup from any where

I used logmein without problem for years with Verizon. With AT&T however, I keep getting an error stating Mismatched IP Address. Anyone have a solution?

Nice guide! Thanks!
The one I am most interested in is actually Niveus as it gives a much "integrated" feel, and I don't use any app other than MCE on my HTPC anyway.
Shame it is not suitable for this guide, but have you at least tried it? Any opionion on Niveus?
Thanks.

good review, av tried all the bluetooth ones with no luck, somehow they just cant connect although my fone and ppc are al paired..
can anyone point me on how i can use the wifi one, as in how do u setup.
i have a router in my house from which i can connect to the internet, we dont any network in the house. so how can i setup my PC to connect with PPC so that i can use the remote control.

shyboy said:
good review, av tried all the bluetooth ones with no luck, somehow they just cant connect although my fone and ppc are al paired..
can anyone point me on how i can use the wifi one, as in how do u setup.
i have a router in my house from which i can connect to the internet, we dont any network in the house. so how can i setup my PC to connect with PPC so that i can use the remote control.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Does your handset see your desktop via Wi-Fi - for example, a Web or an FTP server? Can you ping it?

i can only connect to the internet..is there any 'special' procedure to see my desktop?

An update from me: Pebbles will probably go open source, please take one minute to check out this thread. Then we could build our own remote according to our needs:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=4782671

The UPnP Bible

Introduction
What is Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and why you might want to make use of it? To get a nice overview what it’s all about, spend some time on reading the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) tutorial’s first three pages HERE, HERE and, finally, HERE. These pages are also interlinked so you can just safely follow the “Learn how DLNA works” link at the bottom of the first page. I especially recommend the interactive “What can you do with DLNA products?” section at the bottom of the third page. Try selecting all the possible pairs to see what a particular device pair can be used for - this demo is really instructive. An example screenshot showing what for example the NAS & networked TV pairing can be used for:
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
Pretty instructive, isn't it? Again, I really recommend playing with the different pairings so that you get a clear picture of what UPnP can really be used for. In addition, please PLEASE do read the above DLNA intro (the three pages) so that you understand what UPnP is about and the terms used in this UPnP Bible. I’ve refrained from reproducing (almost) the same info in here so that I could concentrate on the more important and never-before-published subject: how this all works on the two most widely used mobile platforms: Windows Mobile and Symbian.
You might also want to take a look at the Wiki page (most importantly, the “UPnP AV (Audio and Video) standards” section) but it’s highly technical and, for a non-pro, in no way as comprehensible as the DLNA tutorial. Note that the DLNA tutorial doesn’t explain what “Controllers” are. It’s, as has also been explained in the Wiki (officially referred to by “MediaServer ControlPoint”), is like a remote controller between the source (the “MediaServer”), that is, typically a file store, and the target (the “MediaRenderer”); that is, typically, a TV set, a monitor or a home Hi-Fi.
On both Windows Mobile and Symbian (more precisely, the latest-generation, N-series Nokia handsets) all these three functionalities are supported:
a phone can act as the source (“MediaServer”) of multimedia content (for example, the pictures you’ve taken with the built-in camera; the MP3’s you have on your storage card etc.)
it can also act as the mediator (“MediaServer ControlPoint”) between the server and the renderer. That is, it can select the files on the server you’d like to, say, see on your TV / listen to on your home Hi-Fi etc. It also allows for basic playback control functionality like pausing/ resuming, previous / next etc.
finally, it can also function as the target of the stream: the device that actually plays back the video / audio / images on its own screen / audio unit. That is, it’s also a “MediaRenderer”.
As far as the two operating systems are concerned, all these functionalities are implemented. First, a birds-eye view on what’s available and supported.
For Windows Mobile (WM), currently, there are three apps with UPnP capabilities: Nero Mobile Pro, Conduits’ Pocket Player and Rudeo Play & Control (at the time of writing - December, 2007 - no preview of CorePlayer 1.2 was available. It will also have UPnP support.)
For the newer Nokia N-series Symbian devices (N95 (8 GB ), N81, N82), the OS already has built-in, pretty impressive (no third-party, commercial apps are needed) UPnP support.
[*]: with the N95, only starting with firmware version v20, not with previous OS’es; also see THIS. Note that the manual printed with the original N95 still reflects this (old) state.
[**]: limited presentation capabilities (while it has no problems with the much more important streaming): no library, not even file system folder-separated view
Now, let’s take a look at what functionalities the MediaRenderer-capable applications offer.
I'll later explain what the difference between pre-fetching and streaming is.
Incidentally, the second column ("Accessible for external controllers") is also clearly visible in the following Windows Vista screenshot:
It shows the following UPnP servers / renderers in order: Nero MediaHome (server), N95 (server), (the notebook itself, where the screenshot has been taken), the built-in UPnP server of the Vista on the notebook, the Conduits Pocket Player (PP) renderer (!) on the “wr-x51v” PDA; the same PP on the same PDA as a server; PP as a server on the “wr-univ” and, finally, PP as a renderer on the same “wr-univ”.
1.1 Differences between traditional Remote Media Controllers (RMC’s) and full UPnP applications
Back in February, I’ve already published an extensive Bible on all non-UPnP applications. Now, let’s see what the real difference between a fully-fledged UPnP app and the, back then, reviewed remote controllers is!
First, as you may already have guessed (without even reading my previous Bible), RMC’s can only remotely control media player applications – they don’t offer built-in, local rendering (MediaRenderer) or file serving (server) capabilities. The best, UPnP-capable titles in this respect (currently, as of late December, 2007, Pocket Player 3.51 on Windows Mobile and the built-in UPnP client on the latest Nokia N-series models) offer both of these.
Second, their configuration can be much more complicated than those of UPnP clients, particularly when you need to manually (!) enter the local network address of the server (also containing the media player) you’d like to remotely control. This is true with almost all RMC’s not capable of discovery protocols to automatically discover controllable servers in the LAN. UPnP’s automatic discovery also greatly helps in this respect: you don’t need to do any manual work; just let the controller discover the servers / renderers and you’re all set.
Third, you can only remote control a Windows PC (in cases, other desktop OS’es are also supported) with those “old-fashioned” RMC’s because all the tested applications need server&renderer-side custom software to be installed. This also means it’s impossible to remote control for example Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices (file servers) or plain renderers like a flat TV. With UPnP, all these can be remote controlled.

1.2 Available UPnP-capable software
Now, let’s take a look at what’s available on mobile platforms. Note that as far as Palm OS is concerned, not even Pocket Tunes, by far the best music player support UPnP (and CorePlayer won’t support it either) – you need to go the manual route explained in my RMC Bible for being able to stream stuff from your local UPnP network. There’s a nice thread on this all HERE.
Please, Windows Mobile users, don’t be disgruntled because of including Symbian. Some of the, especially, multimedia / entertainment-centric smartphones like the Nokia N95, N81 and N82 have excellent capabilities well worth incorporating into Windows Mobile handhelds. For example, these devices support UPnP “out of the box”, which is only available (if at all – see for example the complete lack of, say, UPnP printer support in current WinMo apps) with (expensive) third-party applications on WinMo. A direct inter-OS (operating system) comparison like this will certainly help both Microsoft decide to, finally, include UPnP in Windows Mobile (not only on non-WM WinCE 6 devices) and also shows WinMo hardware manufacturers what they should concentrate their forces on – for example, at really (!!!) lowering Wi-Fi power usage when not actively used.
The same also states for Symbian users. I know you’d rather not see Windows Mobile contents in here, but, again, such a comparison is instructive for you too because, then, you’ll know what Nokia should be told in order to improve the facilities of its client. And, as I seriously doubt anyone (except me) would write a thorough feature comparison / buglist of these two operating systems, Symbian developers can make great use of this report.
1.2.1 Windows Mobile
1.2.1.1 Conduits Pocket Player 3.51
Currently (before the release of CorePlayer 1.2 and its UPnP support) this is definitely the best and most versatile UPnP client for Windows Mobile. It has definite advantages over the alternatives: first, as opposed to the two other WM solutions, it can act as a server. Second, as opposed to Nero’s app, it can act as a pure controller (without locally rendering anything), in which it can be pretty handy at just controlling the data flow between your home entertainment devices. After all, if you do have a UPnP-enabled flat TV (with an excellent H.264 decoder), why would you want to watch the same video on the small screen of your smart phone? On the other hand, your phone is one of the best tools to actually remote control the data flow in the network - you, for example, won't need to purchase additional, UPnP-only remote controllers if you already have a UPnP remote control-capable phone in your pocket.
The UPnP interface, accessible under Browse / Network, is pretty easy to master. In addition, moving between the pages (with the left/right D-pad arrows) is very easy too – not so with, say, the much more awkward (and VERY slow!) Nero Mobile Pro, where it's very easy not to be able to click the "Back" arrow at the top of every list.
It’s only at remote controlling that I’ve found it a bit lacking: the pure remote control user interface (UI) it uses isn’t as intuitive as that of Nokia or Rudeo: you need to use a separate, list-based UI. That is, not the native, well-known and familiar playback interface, but a completely different one depicted here:
In this regard, Nokia’s and the Rudeo apps are definitely better. Again, on these, you can use the well-known controls to control the multimedia stream flow between the media server and the renderer as if you played back a local stream as can be seen in the following screenshot:
As can also be seen, Nokia's (and Rudeo's too) not only displays the controls to control the rendering of a multimedia stream, but also displays its metadata, the progress etc. No such features are available with Pocket Player.
1.2.1.1.1 Additional screenshots & usage tips
An example of browsing my (Vista) notebook: the main category list. All these contain the usual categorization: the music list shows the traditional (example of the album view and, inside of it, the list of the individual songs) library view.
The list of videos is also shown; they, however, can’t be played back, not even WMV files (which are, by default, supported by PP with local playback) – only the sound will be heard. If playback starts at all, that is - it doesn’t seem to work on WM6 (only the list is shown, play controls don’t work) ; it does on WM5 as can also be seen in HERE (notice that the movie is being played back). Unfortunately, this also applies to viewing pictures – while their list is correctly displayed, “Play” doesn’t result in their being actually displayed.
PP is also able to use another renderer (screenshot of stepping into the menu); for example, in THIS screenshot, you can see the GUI for remote controlling a device.
1.2.1.1.2 Problems (as of version 3.51)
1. Even Western (äö, for example) accents in the title of the MP3 tags (the one needed to be displayed in the given situation) result in the clients not being able to connect. The Symbian client displays the server’s refusing the connection (“Selected device rejected the operation”):
The Nero Mobile client, when run from another PPC, just crashes and immediately exits when stepping into a view that would contain an accent anywhere. From the same PPC, it “only” refuses to display anything including and after the accent. For example, if you have the album “Hilapiäles” from the artist “Pömpeli”, then, only a single “P” will be displayed as an artist name (the second letter, ö, is already accented) and only “Hilapi” as the album name.
2. When (this is a very rare case but you may still run into it, particularly if you try to remote control a Windows Mobile PDA from, say, a Symbian phone, which defaults to remote rendering) it’s controlled from an external controller and its renderer module is instructed to connect to its MediaServer module, the connection will fail. During this, it just displays a local (192.168.0.1:51524) connection message for about 30 seconds; nothing happens after this, no playback / anything.
3. When operated in direct mode (NOT remote controlled! In the latter case, it has no problems accessing MediaServers!), it can’t connect to other Windows Mobile / Symbian servers (tested with both serving-capable UPnP apps: Pocket Player itself, running on another Pocket PC, and Nokia’s UPnP app). Then, it displays a “Server Error or Access Denied” error message.

1.2.1.2 Rudeo Play & Control 2.9.15
In my RMC Bible, I’ve already discussed the non-UPnP-capable version of this program, Rudeo Control for Windows Media Player. Rudeo Play & Control is entirely different as it’s specifically written for controlling UPnP-compliant servers and renderers – and to play back from the latter.
(playing back a song remotely; also showing the target renderer; note that the song title is only shown at the bottom)
(playing back a song locally, also showing the target renderer)
(server list)
During install time, you can also install a server-side component, which lets for some goodies well-explained in the user guide. It, however, didn’t work with my setup (XP SP2 + WMP 11).
Other screenshots: filelist of the, in the previous screenshot, listed two servers. As can be seen, it correctly lists the categories / files. Quickly playing a title is pretty easy (if you don’t want to fuss with playlists): just tick the given song, tap and hold it and select “Checked – Add and Play” as can be seen in HERE.
It seems it has severe problems with the CPU usage even in pure remote control mode (the same on the Wizard, in pure remote control mode; the red chart is the charted Rudeo executable). The situation is even worse when it locally plays back music (Wizard example screenshot HERE); then, the CPU usage can be so high that the player really quickly chews through the battery. Note that this seems to be a generic problem with all Rudeo products: Rudeo Control for Widows Media Player also had unpredictable, sometimes very high CPU usage (see my previous RMC Bible).
Incidentally, as has already been mentioned, like Nokia’s player and as opposed to Pocket Player and Nero and, it pre-fetches the songs before playing them. This can be a bit time-consuming, largely depending on the speed / optimization of the storage card. Unlike with the Nokia, where you can set where the fetched file should be temporarily stored (either the card or the, at times, much faster built-in storage), you can’t do the same on Rudeo’s controller.
1.2.1.3 Nero Mobile Pro 1.4.0.9
I’ve already reviewed the individual audio file playback and MPEG-4 ASP/AVC playback support of Nero Mobile Pro. Unfortunately, compared to the best (and, at times, even free like TCPMP!) titles, it didn’t really excel at them.
The case is pretty much the same with UPnP. First, it only has pretty basic UPnP support. It has absolutely no MediaServer and (purely remote) MediaController capabilties, unlike all of the alternatives (note that Rudeo can’t act as a MediaServer either; Pocket Player and Nokia can). That is, it can “only” connect to other UPnP MediaServers and play back (locally render) their contents on the PDA itself. That is, you can’t use it at all to, say, remote control the communication between your UPnP-capable flat panel TV and network storage – again, unlike with all the other alternatives.
1.2.2 Symbian (Nokia N-series)
The latest Nokia N-series (that is, multimedia-centric) phones have UPnP support built-in. Before the latest (2007 Autumn / Winter) batch of multimedia Nokia phones, they - in addition to being MediaServers and the ability to send files directly to, say, UPnP printers - were only able to remote control other UPnP devices. That is, they didn’t have local, on-phone rendering (playback) capabilities. Now, with the latest models (N81, N82, N95 8GB ) and firmware upgrades of older models (N95-1 with the v20 firmware), a (pre-fetching) renderer component has also been added.
(main mediaserver list; as can be seen in there, it saw Conduits Pocket Player’s server on my Dell Axim x51v; Orb, Nero Mediahome and the built-in UPnP server in Vista on my notebook called “WR-NOTEBOOK”; the Conduits Pocket Player’s server on my HTC Universal and, finally, the TVersity UPnP server on my notebook.)
A quick tip: by default, when you select a (single) song on an external MediaServer to be played back on the (local) Nokia, when you click on the song, the pop-up window displayed only lists the external renderers.

In order to play back the title on the local Symbian device itself, you must select Play / On device instead:
Note that the other menu item in this submenu, “Via home network”, results in displaying the available renderers on the network – that is, the same dialog as above. Also note that, if you select more than one song to play back with either Mark/Unmark / Mark all viewed or with the traditional multiple selection shortcut on your particular model (for example, on the N95, holding down the pen button while navigating down with the D-pad), you will only be able to use this menu for initiating playback. Simply pressing Action on a title to be played back on another, external renderer won’t work when more than one title are selected.
Note that, in order for the other devices to see your Symbian device (that is, it can act as a MediaServer), you must manually enable “Show phone” in “Visibility in network” in the settings as can be seen in HERE. This needs to be done every time you start Tools / Connectivity / Home media – this setting, unlike with Conduits Pocket Player’s similar setting (Browse / Setting/ Enable sharing), doesn’t stick.
Still speaking of PP, it’s also worth pointing out that, in Pocket Player, sharing your own contents is, by default, disabled; therefore, you may want to click all the three list elements in Browse / Network / Settings so that they become the following:
(the second list item makes Pocket Player controllable from another MediaController. If you don't need it, just don't click it).
Finally, in addition to multimedia playback / remote control, the Symbian UPnP client excels at something the Windows Mobile clients don’t support: handling non-multimedia UPnP devices like wireless UPnP printers. To make use of them, you can just copy any document to them with “Copy to home network”:
1.2.2.1 Problems with the Symbian client
Unlike with all (!) MediaServers (Windows Mobile and desktop alike), it doesn’t support media library or even file system-based file / media separation. That is, while it does have three main categories (Music, Images&Videos, Uploaded) (the latter for direct file transfer – the N95 supports it both as a client and a server – note that few other MediaController clients support this). (The same category screenshot is HERE, taken on the desktop running Cidero, which I’ll elaborate on later.)
Inside these categories, however, ALL the available files are shown without any separation (screenshots: Music; Images&Videos) – neither library-, nor file system-based. Hope the Nokia folks fix this VERY annoying issue some time and at least adds file system-based separation, if not the full Music Player library support.

1.3 Minimizing power usage – with benchmarks
1.3.1 Rendering: Pre-fetching vs. streaming
As has already been explained, a media renderer may opt for pre-fetching a file before / during playback so that it doesn’t have to stream the content all the time from the MediaServer. Two renderers follow this approach: Nokia’s and Rudeo.
Pre-fetching, while it’s certainly has its drawbacks (for example, pre-fetching huge media files may just fail because of the lack of storage space and/or can be lengthy at first), has some definite advantages; most importantly, the Wi-Fi power usage can be minimized – if it automatically powers down itself after a given inactivity time threshold. The following screenshot certainly shows this all:
I’ve played back several songs during the test; the power usage peaks definitely show the boundaries of these songs. (It was slightly before the end of each song that the Wi-Fi unit was activated and the next song was quickly pre-fetched.) As can clearly be seen, the average power usage was 0.57W, which is about only 0.18W more than playing back local MP3’s (see THIS for more info & never before published benchmarks on the latter). Pretty impressive, isn’t it?
Interestingly, keeping the N95 visible (again, it defaults to being invisible) in the Wi-Fi UPnP network (as a server device) was also really battery-friendly – only consuming some 0.11W’s (that is, almost the same as without Wi-Fi).
As far as Rudeo on Windows Mobile is concerned, it also does pre-fetching, which also allows for the Wi-Fi unit’s powering down. However, as the CPU usage of Rudeo is pretty high, the overall power usage will also remain high, particularly with non-battery-friendly CPU’s like the Intel XScale PXA-2XX series (their latest, PXA-3XX series, now, Marvel-branded CPU’s are stated to be better in this respect; I've elaborated on the huge power usage increase with increasing CPU usage when compared to, in this respect, much better architectures like the newer TI OMAP platform for example HERE, in section "1.1.1.1 Battery life considerations" - worth a read!). The following acbTaskMan screenshot (measured on a Dell Axim x51v with minimal backlight and moderate sound volume) clearly shows this:
This chart shows an about 2-3-minute-long initial pre-fetch session, when all the three demo songs were pre-fetched for playback on the local PPC (about 450 mA current, with 600 mA peaks). After the fetching has completed, the player switched to regular playback and the Wi-Fi unit was powered down to idle state, but the CPU usage remained very high (20% at 624 MHz, with much higher peaks) – hence the overall ~280 mA current.
It can clearly be stated that, battery usage-wise, prefetching is WAY better than streaming solutions. The following screenshot shows Nero Mobile Pro (in minimized state – let’s not forget that its graphics takes a LOT of CPU cycles, resulting in even worse figures) streaming (MP3’s from Orb) on the Dell Axim x51v (run without a charger). As can clearly be seen, the average Amperage was around 450 mA’s, while the CPU usage at around 60% - that is, not much higher than with Rudeo (let alone the N95, which has by far the best power management). Yes, prefetching surely has definite advantages.

The situation is similarly bad with Pocket Player, which also uses streaming:
As can clearly be seen, the Amperage has always been around 380 mA (with the lowest backlight level and default Wi-Fi sensitivity setting) – which is still about 100 mA’s more than with Rundo and its Wi-Fi power saving by pre-fetching contents. The somewhat lower CPU usage of Pocket Player doesn’t really help in this respect.
Note that the previous screenshot has been made on the 520 MHz HTC Universal because, on the x51v, for some reason, PP has produced far worse results, where the CPU usage is way more as can also be seen in HERE. Frankly, I don’t know what this is caused by.
Note that both Nokia’s engineers and Rudeo’s developers allow for continuous playback: Nokia pre-fetches the next song while still playing the last one and Rudeo fetches all the songs (and writes to the storage card) while playing the first (few) song(s). This results in no pauses between songs (if there are more than one of them) – only the starting of the playback of the first song will be delayed.
1.3.2 Remote controlling
The situation with pure remote controlling is pretty much the same as with above. The power saving feature of the Nokia kicks in quite fast and results in about 0.15-0.17W generic power usage (that is, about 0.07 Watts more than without Wi-Fi remote control activated). Windows Mobile-based devices, in this mode, fare far better than in the previous case as can clearly be seen in the following screenshot:
As can clearly be seen, the average current is 130-150 mA (just slightly more than without doing anything and a LOT less than the ~400 mA average of active Wi-Fi streaming), which clearly shows the Wi-Fi unit is idling and the CPU usage, which is very low, doesn’t contribute much to the overall power usage.
1.3.2.1 Try disconnecting / powering down your handset when not actively remote controlling!
Finally, a quick tip. As has also been explained in the RMC Bible, you can safely disconnect / power down your handset after initiating a (fully) remote playback – that is, between, for example, a NAS and a flat TV. Then, when you need remote control again, you just power on your device, let the Wi-Fi unit reconnect and you'll almost promptly be able to regain remote control on both the server and the renderer. This is pretty much the same as with traditional, non-UPnP RMC applications and, again, is thoroughly explained in the RMC Bible.
1.4 Networking
If you plan to use your handset in a “real” home environment (to, for example, control the multimedia data flow between a flat TV and a Network Attached Storage), you’ll end up having to use Wi-Fi.
You may (depending on whether your clients are Bluetooth PAN – see below – capable) also want to use Wi-Fi if you “only” have computers on your network. Then, you’ll have somewhat more choices: you can use both infrastructure and peer-to-peer (p2p) mode between the devices. The latter doesn’t require an access point and is supported by both Windows Mobile and Symbian.
However, if you strive for better battery life, you can also use Bluetooth (BT) Personal Area Network (PAN) if and only if all your UPnP components support it. Unfortunately, there’s no widespread support for BT PAN. Symbian devices don’t support it at all; neither do Windows Mobile ones with the MS BT stack in client mode (and, unrestricted, in server mode only with an additional hack). That is, it’s only with Windows Mobile devices with the (in cases, “hacked”, post-installed) Widcomm (Broadcom) BT stack that you can use this form of very battery-friendly form of multimedia sharing / control.
Please also see the related section in the old RMC Bible for more info on all these networking-related questions. Also, let me know if you don’t know how to set up these kinds of networks - but, of course, before asking, first, read the linked article (and all the backlinked ones - I've publsihed several, extensive tutorials on creating for example peer-to-peer Wi-Fi networks).
2. Desktop UPnP apps
Should you want to play with desktop (Windows, Linux, Mac etc.) servers / controllers / renderers, you’ll want to check out the following section. Note that you will in no way need these applications for your mobile UPnP clients to operate in an already-deployed UPnP home network; I’ve only presented it to you so that you know where to look for, say, a pure, but decent and free (!) controller running on any desktop or server OS (for that, I recommend Cidero’s app). These can help a lot with quickly seeing whether a given server is accessible / visible on the network, what content it offers etc.
Another great use for these apps (in this case, Nero MediaHome) is seeing what’s happening in the UPnP network, how many users / clients have connected to your server from which local IP’s. These apps greatly help in tracking down possible networking problems. For this kind of problem fixing, I recommend Nero MediaHome the most.
In the next three subsections, I elaborate on the three main components of the UPnP architecture: (Media)Server, (Media)Controller and (Media)Renderer. In general, there’re no software products implementing all these three functionalities (unlike, say, Conduits Pocket Player on Windows Mobile). There’s On2Share Pro - UPnP AV Suite that promises to implement all of this (it has a 14-day trial and is pretty cheap: only 19.95 euros), but I’ve never managed to make it really work – neither under Windows XP nor under Vista. (I’ve tried to do this on two different desktop PC’s, using two different networking topologies – both peer-to-peer Wi-Fi and using a standard access point. A no-go. While it did list the other UPnP-capable, visible (either a server (upper listbox) or a renderer (lower listbox)) participants:
(another screenshot of the lower part of the server list)
it wasn’t able to communicate with them in any way. (Note that the screenshot has been taken under Vista, using large fonts (a must on a 15" UXGA screen); this is why the lower left buttons are messed up; on XP, with normal fonts, it's correctly rendered. Also note that it displays 127.0.0.1 as the local IP, that is, localhost. This shows the computer had no active Internet connection when the app was started (I've, later, set up an Internet-less p2p Wi-Fi connection manually). Don’t let this make you think I’ve messed up the setup – in other tests, I’ve restarted it so that it received a real LAN IP address. Then, it didn’t work either.)
2.1 (Pure) Servers (MediaServers)
2.1.1 TVersity
Along with Sling (which I haven’t been able to test because it’s still not available in Europe, except for the U.K.) and Orb, TVersity is the most popular remote (WAN; that is, non-local (LAN) UPnP) streaming server, allowing for a lot of niceties; for example, dynamic radio / media transcoding. If you already know this app (because, for example, you’ve used its streaming capabilities over remote mobile networks), you’ll certainly welcome its UPnP capabilities.
(the share config screen; the second tab, with the list of the contents on the server, looks like this – as can clearly be seen, it’s pretty complicated to navigate between the server multimedia contents as there’s no scrollbar. A screenshot of browsing TVersity on a Symbian device is HERE)
TVersity, of course, has its own discussion forum; of it, I recommend THIS thread.

2.1.2 Orb
This is probably the most widely known, free (!!!) home streaming server also compatible with Windows Mobile. It also supports UPnP. It comes with UPnP enabled by default:
Unfortunately, it doesn’t have as nice debug / client configuration capabilities as Nero MobileHome either. But, at least, it’s free and, when it comes to transcoding, definitely more capable than the latter. All in all, highly recommended.
2.1.3 Nero MobileHome
It’s part of the, if you’re into AVC (H.264 / MPEG-4 Part 10) video encoding, pretty much recommended Nero 8 Ultra Edition.
Compared to the first two servers listed above, it has some goodies. For example, with the two servers, it’s impossible to see what clients have been connected, what they’re listening to / watching, what client they use etc. For example, HERE is a list of the renderers found.
The following screenshot:
shows a case in where it’s even more useful: it shows what clients have connected, what they’re streaming / downloading, what they really are etc. In the shot, the first client is Conduits Pocket Player running on my x51v and streaming “02 Track 2.wma” (at 35%); the second is Nero Mobile Pro running on another Pocket PC in the network and streaming “06 Track 6.wma” (at 14%). Also, it lets you define what network interface to use for streaming.
Otherwise, it has pretty much the same capabilities as the former two servers:
- manual addition of shared media directories (note that it also supports automatic refreshing via Nero Scout)
- streams TV
- supports a remote UI
- supports transcoding
(Note that in my forthcoming Multimedia Bible I will continue elaborating on these three products: they have excellent, remote (non-UPnP), smart phone-compliant transcoding and TV/radio streaming capabilities well worth exploiting.)
2.1.4 Other servers
MediaTomb: free, open source, non-Windows
TwonkyVision Media Server (the forum is worth checking out for generic UPnP-related discussions too)
DLink Media Server
Philips Media Manager
JRiver Media Center
Note that Windows Media Connect (still recommended on the Rudeo page) 2.0 is no longer available because the same functionality is built into Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP or Windows Vista
2.2 (Pure) controllers (MediaControllers)
Cidero - Java-language, multiplatform controller. Don’t be afraid of it being written in Java – it’s very easy to install: just download the installer EXE, run it and you’re set.
It’s a very nice and free app. As it has no built-in renderer, you must use an external one to play back multimedia content.
2.3 (Pure) Renderers
Probably the most important is the Un*x-based GMediaRender; unfortunately, it has no desktop Windows version.
Hardware-wise, Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) is generally considered one of the best media clients / AV (for example MP4 HD) renderers.

Whoa, AMAZING!
thank you!
this is very much to digest all at once, but i'll get into it and start trying it for myself

UPDATE (12/23/2007): There’s a nice quick summary of how a mobile device can be used for in a home environment HERE, in the first post of the thread. It’s worth a read if you still don't really understand what UPnP can be used for in everyday life. (Note that it discusses the Nokia N95 in this scenario. Of course, any other, UPnP- & remote control-capable mobile device can be utilized in exactly the same way. Also note that it still discusses the old, pre-v20 firmware of the Nokia N95. As has also been mentioned in the (currently) last post of the thread, the N95 has received real renderer capabilities in the meantime.)

Omnia
The Samsung Omnia now comes with uPnP control point software.

yannick said:
The Samsung Omnia now comes with uPnP control point software.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
cool, thanks, in a subsequent update, I'll post this piece of info.

By wikipedia, a list of hardware and software UPNP media server/player/renderer/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPnP_AV_MediaServers
It hasn't a seccion for windows mobile, anyone for add our seccion for PDA?

great write up!

TURORIAL: Listening to Sirius Radio on your handset

Now that I’ve published the Radio Stream Transcoding Bible (which has, in the meantime, been frontpaged by MoDaCo and All About Symbian!), I’ve received several questions and a lot of help requests on listening to Sirius streams on all mobile platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian etc.) This article will surely help them a lot. (Note that I’ll also publish a similar article on XM Radio very soon).
Sirius Satellite Radio is one of two satellite radio services operating in the United States and Canada, along with XM Satellite Radio. It also has Internet streaming, which needs specialized clients because of the need for authorization. (Sirius’ streams aren’t free.)
1. If you have a Windows Mobile device...
... then, all you’ll need (unless you have VERY specific needs – more on them later) is SiriusWM5 downloadable HERE for free, for both Pocket PC’s (Windows Mobile 6 Professional / Classic) and MS Smartphones (Windows Mobile 6 Standard).
This app, which is just a front-end for either the built-in (Pocket) Windows Media Player, is really easy to use – you just fill in your official, Sirius login / password credentials in File / Settings (Guest accounts are disabled – don’t tick in “Guest”):
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/SiriusWM5Credentials.png
and, after saving this info, select the channel you’d like to listen to, enter the captcha text (alternatively, you’ll can also click Play (right softkey) and enter the number it says) and the playback will begin, with the song metadata (artist / title) displayed at the bottom of the screen, while the channel image in the top left corner.
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/SiriusInsideAChannel.png
Note that the metadata is only displayed in the GUI of the app, not inside the player:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/SiriusWM5TCPMPBackgrounPlayback.png
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/SiriusWM5NosoundMetadataInWMP.jpg
Also note that, while you can use TCPMP to play back the stream, you may have a little less power consumption and a little quicker handset if you just stick with the default WMP. The reason for this is that TCPMP consumes about 4% more CPU cycles at 624 MHz than WMP when playing back WMA. Note that, fortunately, SiriusWM5 itself doesn’t contain about anything: when run in the background, about 0.1% CPU cycles and, in the foreground, with activated song metadata, about ~1%. (Again, on a 624 MHz Xscale PXA-270).
1.1 Additional goodies
In last September, the developers of SiriusWM5 started working on a vastly enhanced (and also XM Radio-compliant) version of the app. See for example THIS for more info. THIS thread may be also of interest: it elaborates on what the developers plan: transcoders running on the clients’ PPC’s etc:
1.2 When NOT to use?
If you have a Windows Mobile device, in most cases, SiriusWM5 will just suit you great. In some cases, however, you’ll want to use a transcoder to be able to listen to high-quality (!) Sirius streams over a slow GPRS connection. This is what SiriusWM5 can't provide - after all, WMA itself is useless when it comes to delivering quality sound at GPRS (read: 32 kbps bitrate at most) speeds. Then, you'll need to turn to a HE-AAC v2-capable solution.
2. uSirius-based transcoding
To be able to transcode Sirius on your desktop computer, you’ll need uSirius, which is a free download and is, in some respects (except for preserving the song metadata / other textual broadcast info), better than SiriusWM5. It’s available HERE; the latest, tested version is 1.0 Release Candidate 5.
Note that, in order to be able to access the high-quality, 128 kbps original streams, you need to subscribe to the CD-quality additional pack - currently for $2.99 a month. If you aren’t a subscriber, I don’t see much point in trying to running a local transcoder for you as that of SiriusWM5 doesn’t degrade the sound quality much – using a 32 kbps stereo WMA as can be seen in HERE, its sound quality is acceptable. As it’s transcoding a stream of already-degraded sound quality, you won’t get far better sound quality with a transcoder running on your device either.
However, Palm, iPhone, Blackberry and Symbian users, who don’t have a native front-end for Sirius, MUST rely on local transcoding. For them, the following three sections will be essential. As you’ll see, I provide you with an in all cases (even over NAT’ed connections!) working and fully remote controllable (you can listen to any of the original Sirius channels) solution.
2.1 Using uSirius
After you install and start uSirius, click the Settings button and fill in your username / password pair:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/UsiriusProvideLoginPwd.png
Press OK and click the now-activated Start (the mouse is hovering over it in the next screenshot):
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/UsiriusStart.png
Now, click the XBMC button (the fifth from the top) and select a target directory to export the local URL’s the streams of uSirius can be accessed at by the external transcoder tools:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/xbmcURLExport.png
and rename them to *.m3u:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/RenameStrmToM3U.png
(a Total Commander screenshot of doing this)
Now, you’ll need to change all occurrences of http:// to mms:// in all these files. You can do this by hand; however, if you prefer automatizing this task, download Replace in Files from HERE. Install it and let it start; quickly fill in the fields as in the following screenshot:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/repliaceInFilesInAction.png
and press Replace All. You’ll be shown a success report:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/repliaceInFilesInAction2.png
You’ll need to import these m3u playlist files in the different transcoders – either Orb or Winamp. In the following section, I elaborate on both.

2.2 Transcoding with Orb
Importing the playlists prepared in the above way is pretty easy: as has already been explained in the Radio Transcoding Bible, right-click the Orb icon in the system tray, select Configure, go to Media and click Add in the Music folders group. Select the directory you’ve stored your M3U’s:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/adduSiriusExportToOrb.png
and you’re set – they should, sooner or later, turn up under Audio / Playlists / Imported Playlists on your handset.
2.2.1 If mass m3u playlist importing doesn’t work...
Note that the current beta version of Orb may refuse importing the M3U files for no apparent reason. If you in no way can make your files visible, you’ll need to manually add your favorite stations to Orb. This, unfortunately, involves a lot of work if you have many favorites.
To do this, go to the configuration Web page of Orb (by, for example, double-clicking the Orb icon in the system tray) and select Open Application / Audio:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/POrbOpenAppAudio.png
In there, click “Internet Audio” and, when the new (top) context-dependent toolbar is displayed, click Add custom at the top (in the following screenshot, the mouse is hovering above it):
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/POrbOpenAppAudio2.png
A new pop-up window, Add a custom channel, comes up; in there, you’ll need to fill in the station name you’d like to listen to and the local URL (to path). You can enter anything in the former field; to fill in the latter, you’ll need to do the following: in the uSirius client, click URLs (the third button from the top), select your favorite channel from the Channels drop-down list. Now, highlight the entire contents of the non-editable URL text area and right-click to access the context menu. In there, select Copy:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/POrbOpenAppAudio4.png
Note that you shouldn’t ever tick in the “Sonos / MPlayer Compatible URLs” checkbox. Then, you’ll be shown two external (as opposed to local; in these screenshots, 169.254.2.2) URLs; one of them, the MMS one, working only, but only resulting in a runtime, client-side error message like THIS. The local addresses (again, addresses starting with 169 like 169.254.2.2) will work just fine.
Note that you can do the same with the exported M3U files - just copy their contents to the clipboard. Then, you can entirely avoid having to copy all the URL's from inside uSirius.
Switching back to the browser instance running Orb configuration / maintenance, fill this info into the Path field of the Orb custom URL dialog (also fill in the “Name” field!):
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/POrbOpenAppAudio5.png
Click Submit. After a quick test, it’ll be added to your Orb internet stream favorites.
Now, you can go on adding your favorites in the same manner; for example, the following screenshot shows the state after also adding Sirius 0 – The Bridge (in the foreground, I also show the uSirius URLs screen, ready for copying the next URL to the clipboard for a later import to Orb; in the background, you see the IE browser instance with the Orb configuration dialog):
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/POrbOpenAppAudio6.png
Now you’re done (of course, you can still add additional Sirius stations); when you fire up your Orb client on your handset, you’ll already see the just-added streams under Audio / Internet Radio Favorites:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/OrbClientListing.png
(VGA WM5 PPC)
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/OrbClientListingSym.png
(a Symbian screenshot of the same, with an additional station)
… and can start listening to it; a Symbian screenshot of this:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/OrbSymListen.png
(Again, on Symbian, you can only use non-NAT’ed connections to access Orb.)
Unfortunately, as can be seen, the song metadata (the title / artist of the current song) isn’t displayed in either Windows Mobile or Symbian – unlike with the native WM client, SiriusWM5.
3. Non-Orb-based transcoding (Winamp)
Should you want to avoid using Orb for the reasons I’ve explained in the Radio Stream Transcoding Bible (no support for Symbian-compliant SHOUTcast; no support for the GPRS-friendly HE-AAC v2), your best choice is Winamp + the Oddcast plug-in. Then, you can dynamically switch between the stations (assuming you’ve added the local uSirius-generated URL’s to Winamp manually) with a Winamp remote controller (of which, again, there’re several – also for Symbian and Palm, if you use a Web-based controller) and can enjoy the advantages of Winamp + Icecast2-based transcoding as opposed to that of ORB, particularly if your handset is able to play back HE-AACv2 (currently, Windows Mobile handsets with TCPMP).
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/WinAmpIceSiriusTranscodeSM2.jpg
(click the thumbnail for the full-size image; it shows all components of the Winamp-based transcoding, including uSirius as the source, Winamp as the player, Oggcast as the transcoder, Icecast2 as the streaming server and a mobile client, CorePlayer, running in SOTi Pocket Controller, the, in my opinion, best, highly recommended remote controller for Windows Mobile)
Note that you can’t use VLC because uSirius just refuses to accept its incoming requests as can be seen in the following screenshot:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/usirisNonVLCCompl.png
Unfortunately, in VLC, it’s not possible to modify the MMS user agent (unlike that of HTTP(S) – screenshot HERE and HERE of this, respectively).
You can’t use StreamTranscoderV3 either because it doesn’t accept MMS (WM) input, only that of SHOUTcast / Icecast.
3.1 Importing M3U files into Winamp
Importing the M3U files exported from uSirius into Winamp is, fortunately, much easier than with Orb – with guaranteed results. In the Media Library view, right-click Playlists and select Import playlist from folder:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/WinampImpPlaylist.png
Select the directory and all your stations become promptly available:
Image link: http://www.winmobiletech.com/012008Sirius/WinampImpPlaylist2.png
waiting for playing back / transcoding via, for example, the OddcastV3 plug-in.
Again and again, please DO read Radio Stream Transcoding Bible for more information on the secrets of transcoding and Winamp remote control so that you can have the same freedom of switching channels any time as with the Orb client or with SiriusWM5. You’ll find an answer to all your questions in there. Just keep trying to digest the vast amount of info I’ve presented in these Bibles – you’ll, finally, succeed, I’m absolutely sure

I think an easier solution would be to download SiriusWM5...

The Multiplatform Lyrics Bible

Along with tags and cover arts, lyrics are also highly sought-for and widely used metadata, particularly with non-English folks who would like to know the lyrics of the songs they listen to.
Of the three mobile platforms I currently support (Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian), two (WM and Symbian) have players that are able to display lyrics; BlackBerry, currently, doesn't. Note that the, in most respects, best player on the supported (currently, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm and, at least in the near future, iPhone) platforms, CorePlayer, will only receive support for lyrics in the far future (at least a year or even more) - around version 1.6.
On Windows Mobile, in addition to the excellent, albeit a bit outdated TCPMP, four, otherwise not really top-of-the-line players can show lyrics while playing. One of them, LCG Jukebox, also exists on Symbian - with exactly the same features. On the latter operating system, it's only this program that is capable of displaying lyrics. (Again, this will change when CorePlayer receives lyrics support - but that's still waaaay off.)
1.1 Lyrics formats
First, you need to know what lyrics formats there are. They are as follows:
separate (!) TXT and LRC files using the same filename as the original song file. That is, for example, if the song is named Madonna - Material Girl.mp3, then, the accompanying LRC / TXT file - in the same directory - must have the name Madonna - Material Girl and the extension LRC / TXT, respectively. (For example, Madonna - Material Girl.lrc should be the full name of the song.)
Of the two formats, LRC is the far more advanced and widely supported, mostly because of the metadata (among other things, timestamps for correct time synchronization). You can find a decent tutorial on the features LRC files offer for example HERE.
Note that LRC isn't THE solution for everything newer, even more sophisticated lyrics containers support; for example, it lacks built-in bi/multilingual support.
built-in, inline (non-separate) tag-based lyrics. There are three kinds of them. For techies, the best source explaining the three major in-song (tag-based) lyrics format is ID3.org. The links to the respective documents (along with a quick summary): ID3v2 (not only a lyrics storage format, but also stores all kinds of other info: the traditional artist / genre etc. fields coming from the two pre-v2 versions of the ID3 standard), Lyrics3 (a heavily outdated format not recommended because of its severe restrictions) and Lyrics3v2 (this is the, along with the - independent - ID3 v2 standard, is the currently used best approach.) In my compatibility chart, I also provide explicit info on the compliance with all these three formats. These can be both synchronized (with timestamps; also see the LRC files) and non-synchronized.
Of the former group, LRC is compatible with all the lyrics-capable players and allows for time synchronization, which may be pretty important for several users. The latter, which is superior in practice (you can't easily lose your lyrics if you forget to transfer the separate LRC file along with your main song file) is only compatible with one: MiniLyrics, only on Windows Mobile. Fortunately, the, if you can live with the very infrequent nagging screens, free (!) MiniLyrics, which also has a plug-in compatible with almost all the desktop players (the most important exception being Videolan VLC), offers conversion capabilities between LRC and inline tags.
1.2 Creating lyrics
You can easily create a TXT or LRC file (of the latter, even a synchronized one) without any external, specialized editor or tool - just a plain Notepad (or any other basic file editor) will suffice. This, of course, won't work with the tag-based (built-in) lyrics format because you'll need an application including your lyrics in the file. Fortunately, most common desktop multimedia players allow for doing this. For example, the way it's done in the stock Windows Media Player (WMP) 10+ is explained in the Add Lyrics to Music Files tutorial. (As this tutorial is pretty well written and easy-to-follow, I won't elaborate on doing this in WMP at all.) The already-mentioned free/"nagware" MiniLyrics is also highly recommended.
As with most WMP library-related functions, lyrics editing is pretty restricted even in the latest, version 11 of WMP. Sure, you can edit even synchronized text and save in an inline format MiniLyrics (on Windows Mobile) is compatible with, but it's roughly all you can do. On the desktop, there are several add-ons or plug-ins (like MiniLyrics) that heavily enhances this functionality like adding lyrics search capabilities. (Note that all the reviewed mobile players also allow for online searches - with varying degree of success, though. More on this later.)
1.3 Available players
Note that I've published a review of two of the four Windows Mobile apps HERE. In the meantime, however, new versions have been released of both apps and, therefore, I found it necessary to re-do all my tests to find out whether there are any notable changes or enhancements (unfortunately, not much).
1.3.1 Lyrics Magic
(current, tested version: 2.1)
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This, it seems, discontinued (for example, the lyrics searching database doesn't seem to be any more maintained) player is not recommended because of the high price (while clearly the best two players, TCPMP and MiniLyrics, are free; so is the rather simple WinVibe), the incompatibility with inline tags and, of course, the non-working search engine.
Note that "Open File" uses the default file selector dialog; if you dislike this, you can safely use a third-party tool like my favorite, FileDialogChanger by Mad Programmer. If you dislike both approaches, use "Open Folder" instead.
1.3.2 WinVibe
(current, tested version: 4.9.6)
(The text window can be made bigger by further clicking it but still individual lines will be shown, meaning you won't see almost anything of the context)
The lister screen for non-synched LRC files (and to see / scroll the entire text at once):
This is a free player. It has a bit high CPU usage (in which LCG Jukebox is clearly the best - at least in the lyrics player group; still, it's a far cry away from the best titles in this respect; for example, CorePlayer) and rather rudimentary, textual-only lyrics display (as opposed to the smooth, much more spectacular, small-character scrolling of the other titles). It, most of the time, also failed at online searching - as opposed to the two best titles in this respect, LCG Jukebox and MiniLyrics. (This, of course, will only be an issue if you do want to search for the lyrics of a given song on your handset and not on your desktop. In most cases, you'll want to do the latter while maintaining your song library; that is, bad support for online searching isn't that big an issue.)
1.3.3 LCG Jukebox
(current, tested version: 2.30)
(VGA, Windows Mobile)

(QVGA, Symbian, also showing the current manual offset in the upper left corner)
If you're ready to actually pay for your stuff (or, you're on Symbian, where there aren't other solutions), you can put up with the GUI that really shows its Symbian roots and, for some reason, you don't want to go with the, in general, superior MiniLyrics or TCPMP, this should be the player to check out. Again and again, give a try to MiniLyrics or TCPMP first – they’re better in most respects (except for the CPU usage, as far as MiniLyrics is concerned or the online searching capabilities, which is missing from TCPMP) if you're on Windows Mobile. (If on Symbian, LCG Jukebox is, again, your only choice.)
1.3.4 MiniLyrics
(current, tested version: 5.1.2725)
(WinMo download at the bottom of the page HERE)
A desktop shot of its finding several Finnish Eppu Normaali titles using the built-in search engine:
While on the desktop it's a plug-in, on Windows Mobile, it's a standalone multimedia player compatible with all major compressed formats WMA, MP3, AAC-LC and OGG formats and full (!!) inline (and, by importing and converting to inline tags, LRC / TXT / SRT) files.
I really recommend playing with the desktop version a bit, checking how downloading, tag updating etc. works. After this, switch to the Windows Mobile version (note that, unlike on the desktop, it's a standalone app and NOT a plug-in to Windows Media Player Mobile!). You'll already be familiar with the way the mobile version works: yes, it has exactly the same features as the desktop version. This is certainly very good news!
This player, along with TCPMP, is the best, most recommended one.
1.3.5 TCPMP
The slightly outdated but, in many respects, still one of the best, free (!) multimedia player, TCPMP, also has (unofficial) lyrics support.
(VGA, default skin)
To install the additional lyrics support on top of the recommended TCPMP version, 0.72RC1, you’ll need to get the SP 176*220 or QVGA downloads in the first post HERE or the VGA one HERE, in the 2nd post.
Installing them is very easy: just copy the contents of these compressed files (after decompressing them, of course) to the home of your TCPMP installation; for example, \Program Files\TCPMP.
If you want to see the entire QVGA dialog, in Options / View, unclick at least two items (Titlebar, Taskbar, Timeslider – I recommend the first two). This may also be necessary with some non-default VGA skins on VGA devices (the default one doesn’t make this necessary). Also note that the QVGA version (as opposed to the 176*220 MS Smartphone and the VGA ones) comes with only one skin; the other two come with several.

The settings dialog is under Options / Settings / Select Page / Lyric. It’s also in here that you can disable sliding (that is, fine scrolling), which will considerably reduce CPU usage (from around 38 to 30% on a 624 MHz Intel XScale PXA-270/310). Doing this is pretty easy: just uncheck the Slide checkbox:
2. Comparison charts
Now follows the most important & informative part of my Bible: the two charts. The first elaborates on the more common issues like price, compatibility with the current lyrics formats, how an in-app search for Madonna's Material Girl fared etc.; the second compares the CPU usage and media format compliance. I've paid special attention to benchmarking the CPU usage (which, on several mobile platforms, has a direct impact on the battery life.)
2.1 Generic features & lyrics tests
Note that I haven't listed stuff none of the players promise (and, equally, not deliver); for example, ID3 tag-based full (!) library support. (None of the players support it, unlike, in non-lyrics-specific respects, much more advanced players like CorePlayer, the just-ported Pocket Tunes or Pocket Player.) None of them support AVRCP (Bluetooth remote control) either - not even LCG Jukebox on Symbian. (On Windows Mobile, I've tested this with both the MS and the Widcomm BT stacks to be absolutely sure.) TCPMP over Widcomm IS AVRCP-capable under WM2003SE – but who uses WM2003SE anymore?
(original HTML chart HERE)
2.2 CPU usage and format compliance
(original HTML chart HERE)
I haven’t devoted a separate row to TCPMP because I’ve already benchmarked its media playback CPU usage HERE. MP3 playback with lyrics results in a whopping 38% CPU usage with finescroll (more than three times more than the default ~11%!). Fortunately, you can disable fine scrolling if battery life is of extreme importance to you and you can put up with the less spectacular row-based scrolling; then, the CPU usage decreases to 30% “only”.
3. Verdict
If you're a Windows Mobile user, give a try to the (mostly) free MiniLyrics or (if you don’t need for example downloading capabilities) TCPMP first. The also-free WinVibe may also be a good choice if you can put up with the not-so-spectacular lyrics display (of course, TCPMP is vastly superior to this player in most respects). If you're ready to pay, LCG Jukebox might also be of interest if you like the interface (I, personally, don't). Lyrics Magic should be forgotten altogether - it's not only commercial, but also buggy and no longer supported.
If you're a Symbian user, LCG Jukebox is your only choice.
Again, note that CorePlayer will only later receive lyrics support. Until then, you can forget advanced functionality like library or Bluetooth AVRCP support altogether, unfortunately - along with the very low CPU usage and compatibility with most audio formats (except for, of course, HE-AACv2 a.k.a. aacPlus - as of the current, 1.2.5 CorePlayer version).
4. What next?
In the near future (1-2 days), I publish another article on multimedia apps, further elaborating on other, ID3 tag-based issues like album art, finding , mass-entering and changing artist / title / etc. info. I also thoroughly compare the advanced library handling capabilities of Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian multimedia players.

I've decided to stick my latest Bibles & tutorials in the General forum for some days in a round-robin fashion. That is, I stick some 2-3 articles at a time and, after some days, I stick another set. This way hopefully everyone will notice them without even searching and they get the exposure they deserve.
All in all, don't be afraid: it's only some days that a given article remains sticky - after that, I stick another one.

UPDATE (09/07/2008) (Windows Mobile only!): The recently-released, 3.7 version of Conduits Pocket Player has some support for (only) embedded, unsynchronized (!!) lyrics.
A screenshot of it displaying the (again, static, non-timestamp-based) lyrics:
To see this window, you need to go to Menu > Current Track > Lyrics:
Note that this menu item will only be displayed with embedded ID3v2 unsynchronized lyrics and nothing else - no LyricsV3, no synchronized, no external LRC files.
Note that synchronized, embedded lyrics (and external LRC files) is NOT displayed at all. With ID3v2 embedded lyrics, it notices it being there (but still doesn't show it):
With LyricsV3 embedded lyrics, PP doesn't even notice the lyrics in there (unlike with ID3v2), let alone displaying it.
Hope (some of) the next version(s) add support for synchronized lyrics as well. For the time being, if you do need synchronized lyrics (and not just plain synchronized) and/or external LRC support, go for the above-reviewed alternative solutions; for example, TCPMP. Note that the "what's new" list doesn't speak of (or show example screenshots of) synchronization support either - that is, I'm pretty sure I'm right in stating it doesn't support synchronization.

After such a long time...is there any decent music player these days that support synchronise lrc files? So sad....

Any new info on those players ?

The Definitive Multiplatform Multimedia Metatag & Library Tutorial & Bible

Compared to the capabilities of desktop multimedia players (see for example the excellent WMP vs Winamp vs iTunes vs MediaMonkey for more info on their capabilities), the mobile ones certainly lack when it comes to fetching, searching for, editing, storing and, in several cases, even accessing / displaying different kinds (album art and/or other images; textual genre / composer / title etc. info; lyrics etc.) of information in audio files. In this Bible, I explain what the non-audio information you can store in an audio file is, how you can easily and quickly find missing information and store them in your songs and what mobile players are able to access them.
What’s the point in all this?
Current media players coming with non-Windows Mobile (WM or WinMo for short) players don’t any more support direct file system access. (And Windows Mobile’s approach requires quite a few taps / button presses too, as opposed to just selecting something from its library.) This is diametrically opposed to the approach of older or not very sophisticated players, where all you needed to do is going to Open File, and you could browse the file system of your handheld right away, changing directories and selecting files to play. In some of the recent built-in multimedia players (for example, on BlackBerry (BB for short) and Symbian S60), this is plain impossible and you MUST rely on the library functionality, which is pretty much useless if your audio files don’t have metadata in them. Actually, in these cases, it's much worse than the old, library-less approach where you just opened a directory for playing back all songs in there. If you made sure your directories contained only one album, this was an adequate solution for most needs.
When you rip an audio CD in Windows Media Player (or any similar CD rip-capable app; for example, my personal favorite is CDex; see my remarks & quick tutorial HERE), WMP may not be able to fetch any information on the songs themselves.
There are major disadvantages of not tagging your songs. First, on all the operating systems, several library-based media players will list the similarly-named and non-tagged music inside only one (All music) category:
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(WMP, showing the filenames. As can be seen, not even the file directories are shown. You can, fortunately, still see them by tap-and-holding a song, selecting Properties and checking out the Location attribute. In THIS screenshot, the path \Storage Card\UUSNAM is clearly visible. Still, you won’t be able to (easily) play unnamed files in a directory, unless you manually pick every, say, third 13 Track 13, 14 Track 14 etc. file and add it to a playlist. It’s really complicated. Alternatively, you can still initiate playing a file in a specific directory using [Menu/][Library/] Menu/Open File and this allows for switching between songs in the directory, but it’s still pretty awkward.)
(BlackBerry 4.5 shot. By default, it lists the files using the same name stored in different directories one after another and only Options / Properties (see the content of the pop-up dialog screenshot) can be used to make a distinction. In addition, the BlackBerry operating system doesn’t have a built-in file explorer tool; that is, you can’t start playing a given song in a given directory by simply navigating to it with a file explorer tool. Finally, the multimedia player in BB doesn’t let for selecting an individual file from inside either, unlike Windows Mobile’s media player.)
(Nokia N95 (Symbian S60v3 FP1) shot. There’s no way of getting the directory of a given file (Options / Song Details only lists – and lets for editing – the ID3 tags and doesn’t show the file system path of the song, unlike under BB or WinMo. You can’t force the player to play a given file from inside either. When you start playing back a file from File Manager, the player 1. won’t play back other songs from the same directory (unlike the case of opening a file from the WinMo WMPM, using Menu/Open File from the Library view) 2. won’t provide you access to the menus (like the equalizer or the stereo widening settings) – all you’ll see instead of the menu is THIS).
All in all, in all the three covered operating systems, NOT having tags in your audio files severely degrades the usability and flexibility of the built-in (and, at least with Windows Mobile and Symbian, some other) media player. When your songs do have metadata in them, separating different genres, albums, artists and, in some, more advanced players, even more sophisticated attributes like years etc. becomes a breeze. This is why you do want to read this Bible thoroughly to find out how this can be accomplished. Learning to make your songs tagged will save you a lot of frustration and greatly enhances your enjoying music. And don’t think it’s hard and complicated! Not in the least, particularly not with the latest tools.
Turning back to the question of current, (in cases, strictly) library-based built-in factory players on all the three platforms, all you see, when you transfer some new songs to the card or insert a completely new one is the player creating / updating the library when you start it and/or it senses a card insertion and/or you explicitly force it to update / refresh the library (Symbian: Options / Refresh on the Library screen; Windows Mobile: Menu / Update Library…; on the BlackBerry, it’s not possible to manually initiate a refresh):
(BlackBerry)

(Symbian S60)
(Windows Mobile)
Don’t think of the recent, library-based approach is a bad thing. Just the opposite. If you do make sure your files are correctly identified and tagged (metadata added), your life becomes much easier and everything you can do with your repository of songs becomes much more flexible.
With traditional (non-library-based) media players all you could do was using (multiple) playlists where you could collect some songs based on some criteria (for example, a given album of a given artist; all albums of a given artist; all songs belonging to a given genre, your top 50 songs you prefer listening to etc.). This all required a lot of work, particularly if you didn’t use the advanced auto-playlist creation features of more advanced desktop media players. By this, I’m referring to creating playlists exactly using some / all of the above criteria. An example screenshot of the auto-playlist creator of the desktop WMP 11, available under Library / Create Auto Playlist:

For example, in the above three screenshots, I’ve shown a way to create a playlist containing the songs of a Finnish pop band (here, referred to as "2n maanantai") which is rated at at least 4 stars. The playlist is named Best of 2n maanantai and can directly be used on mobile clients after synchronizing them there.
Auto playlist creation is, generally, non-existing on mobile devices. Doing the same manually, in general, involves considerably more work.
With the library-based approach, you can do, essentially, the same on mobile devices as with auto playlist creation: you can select what you want to listen to based on several factors. With simpler approaches employed by most players (except for CorePlayer, which has an even more advanced approach), you can traverse in at least the categories Artist, Album and Genre and select the artists, albums and/or, inside them, the songs you’d like to play. You can play the entire (sub)category too – as with all songs.
This in no way involves playlist creation. You only need to create playlists in a library-capable app when you need to express some logical functionality otherwise not playable using the traditional library approach. For example, if you have albums A, B and C of, say, the Artist X, and you’d only want to listen to two of the three (and not the third) albums, you can’t easily do this using the standard library functions of any of the three operating systems (none of them support multiple selections) – you must create a playlist, putting the two favorite albums in it.
The even more advanced (but, unfortunately, for a newbie, pretty much convoluted) CorePlayer is an exception: with it, you can make multiple selections, which helps in not having to make playlists at all to account for logical decisions like the above. For example, to select three of the five artists to play back, you only need to check in the checkboxes in front of the given artists:
(WinMo screenshot; the same is done in exactly the same way under other operating systems)
This will make sure the playback will only iterate over the songs of the three selected artists, not all of them. You can’t do the same in other, non-multiple selection-capable players – again, in them, you could only select one artist to play back. In this respect (too), CorePlayer is vastly superior to all the (current) alternatives. Unfortunately, this also means people do complain about CoreTheque’s (the name of CorePlayer’s library system) being overly complicated. I thought exactly the same when it was first released – it took even me a bit of time to learn it and to understand in what ways it’s superior to the single-selection, far more restricted library system of the other players.
Now that you see the point in having correctly built-up and managed libraries, let’s take a closer look at how you can actually provide your songs with this metadata.
1.1 WMP tag finding & reading
Fortunately, you can save yourself some hours of entering all the metadata (genre, artist, album, song title etc.) by using automatized tools. Of them, I recommend Windows Media Player (WMP) the best for looking up and entering at least textual, non-lyrics data (artist, genre etc.). (Please don’t come telling me why I don’t recommend other tools instead. For example, THIS thread states WinAMP also has auto-tagging capabilities. I want to keep the size of this Bible acceptable; this is why I don’t review other tools in this chapter.)
When you let WMP to read all your (still untagged) audio files into its library (and you do have an Internet connection), WMP will automatically connect to its database back-end to try to recognize your songs. (Please consult THIS tutorial on how the library should be operated in WMP. I do not elaborate on the basics of it, only the advanced features like auto playlist generation.)
To do this, it in no way tries to make use of the current filenames or the directory name your files are stored in. Instead, it compares how the song sounds to the stored songs in its library. (While I’m also a DSP engineer and am pretty well versed in everything physical telecommunication, I don’t know how exactly this is done other than it should be some kind of a simple time-domain or a combined time & frequency-domain pattern matching, also making use of the actual song index inside an album. One thing is certain: WMP doesn’t upload the full song to an approximate comparison to the database, only a small "blueprint" of it.)
This library is based on customers’ existing tag (and album art) contributions. Just for a check, to see whether I have better results with a locked-in, fully commercial system like the Zune, I’ve tested the same with my Zune to see whether being commercial and only available to paying Zune customers. The desktop Zune app (which is definitely inferior to that of WMP – as is, in my opinion, ALL the media manager apps coming with ALL non-Windows Mobile platforms) only found few additional titles; 9 of them was a false hit (for example, mistaking nine of the songs for Snoop Dogg’s The Blue Carpet Department), only a few OK (Ismo Alanko; Juliet Jonesin Sydän - Helppo Elämä – Haluan olla poikaystäväsi; Leevi & the Leavings; Raggars). In some cases, it found the artist (SIG) on compilation disks but took it for another song based on the index of the songs. An example of this is SIG’s Hyvää Syntymäpäivää, which it mistook for Purppura – Paratiisikesä because the former’s index was 9. It didn’t find more album arts than WMP either. Frankly, I would have thought Zune’s desktop manager fares better than the free WMP in this respect.
After WMP has found all the missing info, sooner or later, it updates the original song files (MP3 and WMA only; it’s only with additional plug-ins like WMP Tag Support Extender that it becomes able to write - and, with some formats like OGG, only read - tags) with the just-found info on the hard disk. (On my HP TC1100 tablet PC with 1 GHz CPU, 1.5G RAM and 160GB HDD & no other programs running, this happened almost instantaneously, on my IBM Thinkpad a31p with 768M RAM and 120 GB hard disk, only after some days. I couldn’t find a way to force WMP to do this – "Apply Media Information Changes" doesn’t seem to do the trick.)
Before this physical file update takes place, it’s only WMP’s own library that has the newly found tags, not the physical files themselves. During this, you can only make your only media files that you synchronize with your handset with WMP have all the newly-found tags. In addition, this information will be strictly available for the built-in stock player only (on Windows Mobile, WMP Mobile; on the N-series Symbian S60v3, Music Player), not other third-party players (or at least not the ones I’ve tested) - not even CorePlayer. The reason for this is simple: WMP uses a special library descriptor format not compatible with most? all? third-party multimedia players.
This also means non-updated files that you physically copy to your handset (through, say, a card reader with a simple file copier app like Total Commander or the built-in File Explorer) won’t have any tags in them. Therefore, you should wait until WMP does update the song files physically with the song metadata. You can easily see this because, then, their timestamp changes (and their size may also increase). After this, you can safely use any tool to copy your files – all third-party apps will be able to read and process their tags. Library-capable apps will be able to create a library very similar to that of WMP; non-library-capable apps (the majority of the players) will, at least, display this info and use it for other, dedicate functionalities like looking up lyrics or album art. I’ll later elaborate on the library-capable, advanced mobile multimedia applications.
1.2 Searching for missing tags not found by WMP
There inevitably will be cases when your desktop WMP doesn’t recognize your songs, particularly when they aren’t English or they aren’t stored in an album but are separate songs. Then, you’ll need to do some extra work. Don’t be afraid: it’ll be much easier than you think! There will be almost absolutely no manual work and tedious metadata entry involved.

Probably the best tool to look for & quickly enter / transfer missing tags is the free MP3Tag. (See for example THIS for other choices.) It’s capable of both importing the song titles and other metadata, including album art, into files from the Web and – which is really useful! – convert metadata stored in the filenames to inline ID3 metadata and vice versa. The latter will be really useful when you have a bunch of files only containing song metadata in one form but not in the other. It’s pretty useful to have accordingly named files for, for example, file sharing and handling with non-library-capable multimedia players (the desktop WMP doesn’t have auto-renaming functionality – in this regard too, MP3Tag IS better). On the other hand, library-capable players only take into account the contents of ID3 metatags and NOT the filename when building up the library. With a song that only has the song metadata in its filename, it’ll keep the song as "Unknown" in the library. You will most definitely want to avoid this. That is, the cases when you will want to use the two-directional conversion are:
- The files have ID3 tags only (filled in by, say, WMP’s auto-find), but are still named, say, 10.wma because they’re CD rips made with WMP. WMP, as has already been mentioned, isn’t able to rename these files based on the ID3 tags and give them a more meaningful name. Then, selecting Convert / Tag - Filename will convert these tags into files. Note that it’ll use spaces upon encountering characters incompatible with the file system; for example, slashes (/).
- The files have all the album / artist / title metadata in the filename but not in the metadata. This is pretty common particularly with old files. Then, Convert / Filename – Tag will help. Here, you may end up having to modify the default %artist% - %album% - %track% - %title% filename parsing scheme. For example, if your filenames are names like "Värttinä - 1st Album - 01 - Ruskie neitsyt.wma" (where Värttinä is the artist, 1st Album is the album name, 01 is the track number and "Ruskie neitsyt" is the title), then, you can do the conversion right away. With filenames different from this, you may end up having to edit the filename parser string before the conversion.
Note that you’ll want to use mass-selection (Shift + up/down with the cursor keys or Ctrl-Shift + left click with the mouse) to make the conversion much easier.
Looking up song metadata at freedb.org is equally easy. You manually navigate to freedb.org, enter for example both the artist and album name in the "Search the freedb database" textbox at the top (here, I entered "Varttina" to look for Värttinä’s albums). In the result list, just click (open) the album. If that’s what you’re looking for, look for the "Disc-ID" attribute (in THIS screenshot, it’s just to the left of the mouse cursor). You’ll need to pass MP3Tag both the unique ID given in hexa numbers (here, bf0b160d) and also set the genre when populating songs with ID3 metadata. It’s very easy – the rest will be done by MP3Tag. (Also note that MP3Tag is also able to play back songs – it just uses the system-level player to do the trick.)
Now, let me show you a thorough example of doing this all. Let’s assume we have an album WMP didn’t find any info on and is in, therefore, its just-grabbed state with filenames XX Track XX.wma (again, without any inline metadata; that is, tags). Start MP3Tag and make sure you make the directory having these files visible to the program. To do this, just enter (copy) the home directory of your files to the bottom-most "Directory" input field. In the following screenshot, it’s c:\TYO\080805\full id3\Suomen laulu - kotimaan kasvot:
Press OK. Now, you’re presented a filename-metatag pairing dialog. In this window, you need to make sure the records in the two lists at the bottom mutually coincide. In this case, they do. There may be cases when they don’t; for example, when instead of 01 Track 1.wma, 02 Track 2.wma etc. files, you have 1 Track 1.wma, 2 Track 2.wma etc. (Notice the lack of the leading 0!) Then, you’ll need to manually rearrange the list by selecting a record in the right list and pressing Up / Down to move it one step up/down, respectively.
Also make sure the metadata in the uppermost textfields is OK. Soemtimes you will need to adjust the Genre drop-down list.
Now, just press OK; the tags will be updated:
Now, you’ll still want to accordingly rename your files so that their filename also reflect their contents (unlike the output of WMP’s CD grabber). To do this, keep all the files selected and select Convert / Tag - Filename:

if the (standard) %artist% - %album% - $num(%track%,2) - %title% naming convention is OK with you (the results can be seen underneath the text input field), just press OK in the following dialog:
As can be seen in the Filename column, the files have indeed been correctly renamed:
That’s all – this is what you’ll need to do with most grabbed and, by WMP, not recognized files.
Let me also show you an example of filling in the ID3 tags based on the filename (that is, the exact opposite of the work we’ve done in the last few steps). Do the same as in the first step to make the files visible to MP3Tag:
Select all the files and, then, Convert / Filename - Tag:

We’re lucky: the default format string, %artist% - %album% - %track% - %title%, just matches the filenames of the files; you can make sure this is the case if you look at the area under the text input field:
After this (checking the conversion will be successful), just press OK; the ID3 tags will be created, as can also be seen in the following screenshot:
Let me know if you need a more thorough tutorial on using this excellent tool. Also note that several similar questions have been answered by the tutorial HERE (posted in the official FAQ section of MP3Tag).
1.3 Searching for Album Art
Another thing you may want to consider adding to your music is album art, which, in most cases, is just the front of the CD leaflet (but can be anything else, based on your needs).
Physically, there are two kinds of album arts: inline (stored inside the files) and folder-based; the latter can use the WMP format (using "Folder.jpg") or its own (like (on Windows Mobile and Symbian) LCG Jukebox’s Artist – Album.jpg filename convention). Both the inline and the folder-level approaches have their advantages, problems and (with the mobile players,) incompatibility issues.
The compatibility matrix with these two kinds of images is as follows (given for WMA and MP3 "only"):
(HTML original HERE)
(Note that, on Windows Mobile, Lyrics Magic, WinVibe, Pocket Music, Resco Audio Recorder and GSPlayer don’t support any kind of album art.)
The desktop WMP can also fetch album art automatically and will certainly do this with commonly known albums (but don’t except almost anything for sparse languages like Finnish). For example, it found the Madonna and Värttinä CD covers at once. After finding the images, it’ll store them in the directory first as a separate Folder.jpg file (which is compatible with most players compatible with directory-level images except LCG Jukebox) and, then, also include the inline version in the sound files themselves (a little later – again, in this operation, lagging may occur, as is the case with other tag update operations).
If, on the other hand, you look for an album art not found by WMP, you’ll need to use third-party tools.
1.3.1 Third-party tools
1.3.1.1 MP3Tag
First, you can use the already-mentioned MP3Tag to include not only textual metadata, but also images. To do this, just search for the given album art in, say, Google Images (or any, similar service), right-click the image and select Copy:

Now, right-click the empty disc image in MP3Tag and select Paste Cover:
And, to save the image, select File / Save Tags:
It’ll save the images as an inline one in each of the selected files. Note that it won’t create a directory-level one; if you don’t want to download the image and rename it to Folder.jpg, you’ll want to play at least one of the converted files in WMP. It’ll create this file, along with AlbumArtSmall.jpg, automatically.
(You may want to check out THIS for additional, related tips; note that this tutorial no longer has the inline images.)
1.3.1.2 Other tools
In addition, there are a lot more utilities; some automatized, some not. The automatized ones are mostly commercial but, if you have hundreds or thousands of albums to quickly download album arts for, may still be purchasing – you save a LOT of time if you use them (no manual searching, file downloading and dragging will be necessary – everything is done automatically, you only need to issue 1-2 clicks per album to accept an automatic album art selection or select another one). The best list of these tools is HERE.
1.3.1.2.1 Strictly iTunes-only plugins
Most of these tools are for iTunes only; for example, iArt, TuneSleeve and iAutoArtwork. The first also downloads lyrics (more on lyrics in my dedicated Lyrics Bible). Note that some of the links are dead; for example, iTunes Art Importer, which is no longer available (the old link doesn’t work).
1.3.1.2.2 Standalone
As far as standalone (that is, non-iTunes plug-in) products are concerned, I recommend two of them (in addition to the akready-shown MP3Tag, of course).
1.3.1.2.2.1 Album Art Downloader
Album Art Downloader is a free, self-contained app and searches everything (not just Amazon); however, it doesn’t parse sound files (Artist and/or Album name must be manually entered) and you can’t easily paste the resulting image into WMP either (need to save it first to the file system and paste from there). This can be pretty awkward with several albums (but is still definitely better than the fully-manual way). And, again, it’s free!
1.3.1.2.2.2 MuvUnder Cover
MuvUnder Cover is, as opposed to Album Art Downloader, commercial; the trial version supports saving up to 15 albums. It’s REALLY easy to use and saves album art right inside files. It can’t be instructed to save dir-level thumbnails instead, though (which isn’t a problem because, if you really need them, you can still load your songs into WMP; it’ll make sure it creates the necessary Folder.jpg files based on the inline images).
Note that, by default, it doesn’t search Google Images and, as it doesn’t search for example amazon.de, it won’t find many European non-English titles (like Finnish ones). Fortunately, you can easily make it search Google Images too by enabling "Automatically search for Google Images for artwork if not found from default source" in Options / Artwork. After this, about 70% of my Finnish album art images were found (while only one or two, out of the 30-40 tested albums, before enabling this). Note that it restricts the number of hits to 5. This can be a problem in many cases (Google Images, in general, has far more hits; some of the real hits ranked lower than the fifth). In this regard, some other solutions (even LCG Jukebox) is much better.
Note that, in cases, with images (only) available at Google Image, Album Art Downloader (see above) didn’t find anything, while MuvUnder Cover did. An example of this is Vesa-Matti Loiri - Eino Leino (Google Images link). This may signal a problem with Album Art Downloader’s Google Images search module.
Finally: another famous title, Album Cover Art Downloader 1.6.0 (ex-home) doesn’t exist any more. The Romanian server linked from HERE hosts a version with a CRC error. I could only find it HERE. Unfortunately, I continuously had problems with all the files I’ve thrown it at – it complained about "junk" in the album art. It seems it’s useless.
1.3.2 LCG Jukebox
LCG Jukebox (available on WM and Symbian) is famous for its built-in capabilities of album art searching capabilities over several album art sources, including Google Image (and several others). Fortunately, it doesn't limit the number of hits, unlike the desktop MuvUnder Cover (see section 1.3.1.2.2.2), as can be seen in the following screenshots:

(WM VGA (as can be seen, it makes use of the high resolution) screenshots; it’s exactly the same on Symbian)
Note that it also saves the image file in the file system using the Artist – Album.mp3 file name convention.
Also note that you can also set a JPG file in the file system on Symbian (Options / Album Art). The player, however, has no support for searching the Web for album arts – you need to do the same with an image saving-capable browser like Opera Mini. In addition, unlike with LCG’s app, it doesn’t store the associated album art image in the file system either – the changes will only be reflected in the library.
1.4 Media manager apps coming with mobile devices; synchronizing with desktop WMP
Under WinMo, you don’t get another media manager software. Not that you would need any: the desktop WMP is one of the best tools for this, particularly if you use additional apps like MP3Tag to find / set info WMP couldn't find.
You can find a tutorial on using its built-in mobile synchronization capabilities (which works with all the reviewed three mobile operating systems: WM, Symbian and BB) HERE.
Note that the article discusses WinMo as a client. If you connect a Symbian handset and want to be able to synchronize it with the desktop WMP, select Media Player upon connecting from the list:
With BB, you’ll need to select Mass Storage Mode upon connecting the USB cable:
Otherwise, they remain invisible to Sync in the desktop WMP.
As far as the additional multimedia apps coming with non-WinMo OS’es are concerned, I don’t really recommend them.
I don’t at all recommend Roxio for BlackBerry coming with the (pretty big) download of the BB Desktop manager – it’s far less featureful than WMP and has severe CPU usage problems (RoxMediaDB9.exe using the CPU at 100% even after exiting the main app). Other BB users have found out to be equally bad; see for example THIS and THIS. All in all, never ever even think of even downloading it. WMP is WAY better.
As far as Symian is concerned, Nokia Music Manager (part of PC Suite) is a bit unfriendly too. The new Nokia Music for PC (now in beta) will replace it; it starts shipping with the brand new Nokia N78. I haven’t still tested it; hope (but, sincerely, I doubt) it’ll be on par with the desktop WMP.

2. Main chart
In the following chart, I provide you with a VERY detailed comparison of the currently available, library-capable multimedia players on all the three mobile platforms. Note that the links lead to several screenshots demonstrating the usage of a certain feature.
Library based on…: the categories you can select from. The more, the better. They can be based on either existing tags and the data auto-added by your listening habits. For example, CorePlayer remembers how many times a given song has been played (which may be related to it being popular) and also lets you select the songs to play back based on this frequency.
"All songs" view: if you plan to have access to all songs on your device at once without artist / genre / album etc. restrictions and without having to create playlists and all, you’ll certainly welcome the fact that all of the reviewed players support this operation.
Library scanning: ex/including folders?: for some reasons, you might want to opt for excluding some directories from scanning when building up the library structure to avoid, for example, game sound files being included in the library. (That is, you might want to exclude \Program Files (on Windows Mobile) and the like on your storage cards.)
Only one library, necessitating a card re-read after swapping?, MP3 scanning speed (2136 titles taking up ~7.5G on a 8G class 4 Sandisk microSD card)? and HE-AACv2 scanning speed?: In the chart, I also explain a common test: swapping cards. I have three different microSD cards: a 8GB, a 4GB and a 2GB one. I mostly use the 8GB one in my digicam (so that I can always make sure I have sufficient storage for even longish video recordings), leaving the 4G and 2G cards for my microSD-only WM, Symbian and BB handhelds and handsets. As my music library (even in the super-small, 48 kbps HE-AACv2 a.k.a. aacPlus format) takes up about 7 GBytes, I needed to put one half to the 4GB and some of the rest to the 2GB card and rely on swapping the cards when needed. The need for doing this may be pretty frequent with other users too. In this regard, it’s essential to look at the "Only one library, necessitating a card re-read after swapping?", "MP3 scanning speed" and "HE-AACv2 scanning speed" rows, which (as far as the latter two benchmarks are concerned) compares the speed needed for a full library-(re)read. The former row, "Only one library, necessitating a card re-read after swapping?", elaborates on whether the given player needs to re-read the entire library (which can be very time-consuming with some players / platforms – see for example the HUGE time needed to do this on the Symbian Nokia N95, with CorePlayer!), or, does it have card-specific, stored libraries. As a rule of thumb, players that store their library on memory cards are very fast at swapping cards. In this regard, Nokia’s Music Player and the built-in WMP in Windows Mobile are certainly the best. Some other (Windows Mobile & Symbian) players store their library in the built-in storage and fully recreate it when you insert a new card and initiate a library refresh. However, if you follow my instructions on locating and renaming these library files before inserting the new card, you can avoid all this. Just use a quick, file rename-capable scripting language / environment like nScriptm or MortScript. Search my earlier articles (for example on my blog) for more information on these two scripting languages. They make library switching really-really easy.
Background file / library scanning supported?: Some (not all) players allow for scanning for changes in the background, while letting you do anything else (for example, playing music, traversing the already-built library etc.)
Auto / manual scan? With the latter, scanning initiation?: all the players support automatic scanning when they notice the card has been changed, (re)inserted or a synchronization has taken place. In addition, most of them (except for that of, for example, the BlackBerry OS) also allow for explicit, manual refresh.
Speed of library traversing with a lot of entries: some players (for example, Pocket Tunes on Windows Mobile and, to a lesser degree, Music Player on Symbian) can be / are pretty slow when traversing a library with several hundreds or some thousands of entries.
Again, remember that with the two players mentioned, it’s only over several hundred songs that you’ll start encountering slowdowns while traversing the library, not with fewer ones!
Social networks: Song transfer options from inside the library: Nokia’s Music Player allows for directly uploading your songs to social networks from inside the library view. In this row, I elaborate on the comparable features of other players.
Auto / manual ranking system? If supported, can it be synched back to desktop WMP? Ranking may be very useful, particularly if you restrict playing music only to titles you’ve previously, manually ranked high. Unfortunately, very few players allow for this on mobile platforms: only CorePlayer (WM and Symbian) and WMP (on WM) and neither of them support synchronizing the rating back to the desktop WMP. This should be fixed at least in WMP Mobile!
Manual database comment adding / tag editing?: Symbian’s Music Player and CorePlayer allow for editing tag info (or, with the latter, at least adding a keyword you can use for searching later). Unfortunately, neither player allow for storing the changes back in the files, "only" in the library.
Artist, Album / Contributing Artist separation? : in cases (see the URL in the chart), it might be useful to separate Artist and Contributing Artist. Unfortunately, very few players have so sophisticated a categorizing system in their library.
Multiple same-level category selection to greatly speed up creating playlists / selecting multiple categories to listen to: I’ve already explained the advantages of the multiple category selection capabilities of CorePlayer. As can clearly be seen, not any of the other players are capable of this.
Creating playlists based on library?: all players allow for creating playlists based on the library. In this, I explain the player-specific additional features or problems you may encounter.
Other playlist goodies: sort (TCPMP: only title, of course) Speaking of playlists, some players lack even the most basic sorting capabilities when it comes to playlists. In here, I explain based on what you can do this. As is stated right in the header of the row, TCPMP (for Windows Mobile and Palm) is only capable of sorting by title. Compared to this, CorePlayer’s dedicate sorting capabilities are quite big a leap ahead.
Quick find: particularly with huge libraries (multiGigabyte cards and/or supersmall formats like HE-AACv2), you may have a very hard time finding your stuff if you, for example, forget the artist and, consequently, can’t use the Artist view to find your tunes. Then, some kind of a searching functionality might be advantageous. In this row, I explain how each player fares in this respect.
(HTML original HERE – it’s only in this version that you can click the links!)
Note that on Windows Mobile, HTC Audio Manager (I’ve tested version 1.02.919713) is also library-capable. As it uses the same library as WMP on WM (and is, therefore, fully compatible with the library format WMP creates / uses), I didn’t see the point in including it in the chart. That is, if you insert a card with a WMP library, HTC Audio Manager will also be able to use it. Otherwise, the player is very simple and definitely inferior to Microsoft’s built-in WMP Mobile.
3. Some other links
Use metadata to organize digital media in the Player's library
Alpha Geek: Whip your MP3 library into shape, Part III: Metadata
Symbian: music players: 1 2 (both a bit outdated and lack for example CorePlayer)

I've decided to stick my latest Bibles & tutorials in the General forum for some days in a round-robin fashion. That is, I stick some 2-3 articles at a time and, after some days, I stick another set. This way hopefully everyone will notice them without even searching and they get the exposure they deserve.
All in all, don't be afraid: it's only some days that a given article remains sticky - after that, I stick another one.

UPDATE (09/07/2008):
1. PocketMind's Pocket Music (starting with version 4) is also able to use a full library via Menu / Playlist Organizer:
There, it allows for quick export to the current playlist (which can also be saved to the file system). That way, it only takes some taps to quickly start playing a library selection (select the files you'd like to listen to, tap the rightmost icon at the bottom (with the folder and the arrow), switch to the Curr. Playlist tab and, there, click the leftmost, playback icon. Note that, in this tab, you can also make mass selections using the righmost two icons (checkbox and list):
You'll want to use these before adding to a playlist that already has some elements and you'd want to easily (to avoid having to check in their checkboxes one by one after the addition) delete them before adding the new songs.
Unfortunately, Pocket Music (as opposed to ALL the other, reviewed apps), as of the current, 5.1 version, in no way allows for saving the library info anywhere. This means it'll always rescan your library upon invoking Menu / Playlist Organizer if you, in the meantime, restart the player:
This can be pretty annoying, particularly if you don't want to create playlists but want to dynamically, based on the library, select what you would like to listen to. Also, reading the library isn't very fast either: reading all the metatags of the 4GB HE-AACv2 test suite took 6:49, which is clearly worse than most alternatives on Windows Mobile.
Note that, as with CorePlayer, it supports multiple selections as it uses checkboxes. Note that it allows for switching between different views (Artist / Album, Album / Artist and these prefixed by Genre as in Genre / Artist / Album and Genre / Album / Artist; in addition to this, plain Album title and Artist name catch-ups) using the second icon:
Unfortunately, in addition to the lack of storing the library to avoid having to rebuild it after restarting the player, it doesn't offer too many additional features either. For example, it completely lacks sorting and quick searching capabilities. This was the main reason I haven't included it in the main comparison chart.
2. The just-released Windows Mobile version of Kinoma Play also supports libraries. I'll publish a full review (probably with another update to this bible) later.
3. The recently-released, 3.7 version of Conduits Pocket Player has some enhanced library functionalities. An excerp from the "what's new" list:
"Pocket Player 3.7 enhances the engine that powers its media library and browser in several ways; performance has now been improved through database and file system optimizations, which lead to faster scanning times and fewer track-to-track delays when listening to music.
The Pocket Player 3.7 media browser has also been refined, and is now fully configurable, allowing control over browsing behaviors, such as whether to include local content, network content, or both in the media listings. Users can reorder the browser’s category screen; for example, it can be configured such that the ‘Albums’ option is at the top of the list, and the ‘Songs’ option is on a second page.
Additionally, the media browser now recognizes certain context-sensitive touch gestures, such as swiping left-to-right on an item, or touch-and-holding on an item. These gestures cause actions to be performed, such as adding an item to the current playlist, popping up a menu, or selecting the item for playback. In previous versions of Pocket Player, these actions were not configurable; for version 3.7, these actions can now be remapped based on user preferences."

4. I was wrong about the BlackBerry Media (in BB OS 4.5+): it is able to explore the file system without having to resort to building the library (and/or correct metatags). Just press the Menu button after starting Media and select Explore:

5. (Windows Mobile only) Some clarification about Conduits Pocket Player:
1. Pocket Player supports opening a folder or browsing by metadata
2. Pocket Player has Auto Playlist functionality (but doesn't have an Auto
Playlist editor yet)
3. according to the developer, Pocket Player's metadata support is far more extensive than CorePlayer
4. You can use the Media Browser to play single selections by tapping on
them, or enqueue whole artists or albums by swiping on them (the HTML
summary has a '-' in that box).
5. Pocket Player has integrated album art downloading support (provided by
Amazon.com, which unfortunately disallows the developers to save the images).
6. Pocket Player also parses M4A, Ogg, APE, and FLAC tags. AAC/M4A files are
auto-added to the library if the device has a built-in decoder (most HTC
devices).