Windows Mobile Louisville

I am playing catch-up on some news releases, so forgive me for this being out of date by several weeks!  Back on March 6th, Conduits Technologies released Pocket Player 3.6 for Windows Mobile 6 Standard, Professional and Classic devices.

Pocket Player 3.6 includes new improvements to the library and media browser, as well as many fixes to core functionality and plugins. Pocket Player is also compatible with Windows Mobile 5, Pocket PC 2003, and Smartphone 2003 devices.

MEDIA BROWSER ENHANCEMENTS

Pocket Player’s media browser is used to navigate the device’s media collection by artist, album, genre, and other attributes. On touchscreen devices, simple finger gestures navigate the browser list: a quick swipe on the list will scroll through the items on screen, with the list continuing to scroll, slowing down until the user taps a selection.

In response to customer requests, there is now an onscreen Back button in the media browser, that can be tapped to navigate up in the browser hierarchy. The previous method of dragging left-to-right now pops up a context sensitive menu, where commands to Enqueue, Play, or Delete items can be selected. This menu also contains the commands to exit the browser and return to the main “Now Playing” screen.

LIBRARY ENHANCEMENTS

The media library that powers the media browser has been enhanced in several ways in Pocket Player 3.6. Library performance has been improved, and all problems that have been reported have been addressed. The media library now properly handles compilation albums — those albums whose tracks all have different artist tags.

The media library now supports improved reading of all tag types. In addition to ID3, Vorbis, APE and ASF (WMA) tag support, MPEG-4 tags are now read by Pocket Player. Many popular Windows Mobile devices, notably those from HTC and Motorola, contain decoders for M4A (MPEG-4 Audio) playback in Windows Media Player. Devices that contain this decoder can play M4A files, but in WMP (as in previous versions of Pocket Player) the tracks are not read for their metadata (such as artist, title, and album artwork tags). Version 3.6 of Pocket Player introduces this functionality, so that M4A files show up in the media browser properly.

OTHER FIXES

In addition to many fixes with the media library subsystem, Pocket Player 3.6 addresses all known and reported problems with the previous release, version 3.51, including issues related to device power, screen and backlight, Microdrive support, podcast feeds, and video support (specifically, issues with fast forwarding).

Various plugins have also been updated for Pocket Player 3.6. The FLAC plugin now reads all FLAC tags properly, including embedded album artwork in the track. The WM Adapter plugin has improved its tag import and export routines, enhancing performance. The MPC (Musepack) plugin has been updated to support new library features including the native APE tag support.

Get Pocket Player 3.6 here.

Tags: Conduits, media, MP3, music, Pocket Player

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Software News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.