I've been experimenting a bit more with pTunes and mOcean. I wOnder if this
mAking the sEcond lEtter of wOrds is gOing to cAtch on??
I like pTunes, being a long-time registered user. I've only used mOcean
since yesterday, on the 15-day trial.
I'm looking at these applications from the point of view of their efficiency
and effectiveness as a mechanism to play music sync'd from my ThinkPad. I
know full well that pTunes does things that mOcean can't do, but I'm not
looking for those things right now.
In no particular order, then:
pTunes/WMP 10:
==============
...Syncing is direct by starting the application while connected to a USB
cable or cradle. Cannot sync music via Bluetooth.
...Syncing is with Windows Media Player. WMP has a very strange user
interface which is supposed to improve dramatically with WMP 11. pTunes
advises not to use WMP 11 yet.
...WMP as a library offers the ability to look up albums and update tags
based on selecting an album. You can also buy the album. There is some
funny business going on with the tags in the MP3 files, however, since there
seem to be fields updated that I can't access EXCEPT through WMP. I'll have
to look for a good tag editor (I used to use one and can't recall the name)
and review the songs I updated using WMP.
...Syncing pTunes with WMP is not very robust. My benchmark for syncing
stability is what I'm used to with the Palm hotsync process, which in recent
years has given me no unfathomably obtuse error messages and has caused no
data integrity problems. I know hotsync is a very mature technology compared
to either pTunes/WMP sync of mOcean/iTunes sync, and both of these will
probably improve over time. Numerous issues surfaced, from the device not
being recognized after successfully syncing multiple times, to the device
being recognized as a completely new device, and starting syncing from
scratch even though the music was already on the card, to certain songs
being reported as not being synchronized when the exact same songs had been
successfully sync'd before and were, in fact, still on the card, to the
folders that the sync process creates on the SD card not being updated when
the tag information on which their names were based was updated.
...pTunes/WMP sync puts its folders and files in \Audio\Music on the SD
card, which makes more sense than where mOcean puts them.
...pTunes itself works fine, but I'm 48 years old and I have failed to find
a skin that makes the song name big enough for me to read without reading
glasses, and most skins make the text so small I have trouble even with the
glasses. I suppose 48 year-olds with reading glasses might not be the prime
audience for MP3 player software.
...I find the pTunes user interface a bit klunky, but perhaps that's a
function of the skins I've tried and not the player, to some extent.
...Syncing songs down took on average about 5 seconds per song via USB2
syncing to a fast 133x card. This is much faster than mOcean sync.
mOcean / iTunes:
================
...I had resisted installing iTunes on my new Thinkpad due to thousands of
reports of problems with the application on Windows XP. Nor did iTunes
disappoint me. One component crashed during the install, forcing me to
install the application again. No problem the second time. This type of
behavior is very unusual in Windows XP anymore.
...iTunes syncing with mOcean is through a hotsync conduit, and I prefer
this to the way pTunes syncs. It just makes more sense to sync music when
I'm syncing everything else -- when I push the button! I can also sync
music via Bluetooth, but it takes just under two minutes per song, so
syncing my initial library to the 4gb card would have been impractical by
bluetooth.
...While hotsyncing one can cancel just the mOcean conduit and the rest of
the sync conduits are unaffected, which is nice if you're in a hurry.
...Syncing through the mOcean conduit takes an average of 15 seconds per
song -- roughly 3x longer than with pTunes/WMP.
...The sync conduit puts all the songs in one big folder, which is fine
really. One thing I'm not sure how I feel about is the fact that the file
name on the SD card is just the song title.mp3, not the same name as the
original file on the PC, so you can't just copy music directly onto the card
and have iTunes recognize it as already there. The hotsync process is
slower than just copying to the card would be, but on an ongoing basis this
won't be a big deal. It's a big deal when initially syncing 2.75gb of
music, which is what I'm doing.
...iTunes has crashed twice during the process. First time I just dragged
all 700 songs I wanted to add to the library to it and waited. It sat there
for awhile and then crashed. After restarting it, I dragged more modest
chunks of songs -- 100 at a time -- to the library and it handled that just
fine. Then, I tried syncing the entire library of 700+ songs to mOcean last
night, and it got to about 87 songs and iTunes crashed. I didn't know
perhaps if the software just didn't like Closing Time by Semisonic. I
didn't have time to mess with this further until just now. I'm syncing
again as I type this.
...An update -- on the second sync attempt, I got to a total of 183 songs
sync'd before iTunes again crashed. Not sure if this is an iTunes problem,
an mOcean conduit problem, or if the combination of the two programs just
doesn't like David Bowie. :-) Trying again.
...I really do like the iTunes user interface. More than anything, the
contrast between iTunes and WMP is similar to the contrast between Quicken
and MS Money. This will certainly be a matter of personal taste, but I
think it's widely held that the iTunes UI is cleaner and more usable than
that if WMP, at least pending the release of WMP11, which, I read, borrows
heavily from the simple style of iTunes.
...From what I can tell, iTunes does NOT offer the ability to select a song
and automatically look up an album or possible albums, and update mp3 tags
by simply selecting the album. During this process in WMP you can see the
album art, update the tags, buy the album. Turns out that almost every
other jukebox/library program I know of offers this as well, so maybe I'm
just missing it in iTunes.
...I'd like to experiment with podcasts through iTunes, but it seems to do
podcast stuff only on behalf of iPods.
...I like the iTunes search mechanism, which narrows the display as you type
the letters of a name. This is how WMP11 will work, from what I've read.
All search applications should work this way. I've gotten spoiled by X1,
which works this way, which is why I'll never use Google Desktop Search,
which works the way WMP does: enter the search argument, click a button,
review the results. So 1990's....
...mOcean's user interface is clean and almost as easy to use as a real
iPod, minus the tactile feedback on the wheel. Of course, with the Treo you
don't need the wheel, since the 5-way navigator intuitively maps to the
wheel functions. It's clear why the original name of mOcean was mPod. I
assume Apple rattled its infamous legal saber and Motion Apps changed the
name, but that's just a guess.
...mOcean's sync puts the music files in \PALM\programs\mOcean on the card,
which makes less sense than where pTunes does it, but at least I don't get
all those folders on the SD card.
I'm going to stop now. I realize I should probably put the above in a table
to make it easier to read, but tables in plain text don't work very well,
and my fingers are tired from typing!
Assuming I can get all 700+ songs sync'd (I'm up to the M's now - Meadows by
Joe Walsh! - without a third crash, but I feel one coming) without some
limitation surfacing which is associated with the constant crashing of
iTunes, I'll probably buy mOcean. Even with the slower sync time and
apparent functional limitations of iTunes and mOcean, the UI of both iTunes
and mOcean is more to my liking (and I can show off for all my iPod friends,
including my daughter, Miss iPod 60gb), syncing via hotsync makes more sense
to me than the way pTunes does it, and putting all the songs in one big
folder on the Treo makes more sense to me than the overhead of creating (but
not maintaining) a huge folder structure on the card as pTunes sync does.
YMMV. Hope this helps someone decide, and perhaps helps pTunes and mOcean,
assuming their authors are on this list (as they should be!!) improve as
well.
Cheers,
Don
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Don
Ferguson
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2006 5:46 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [Treo] Gigabytes!! My complete ROMTOOL experience.
...snip...
I'm not completely crazy about the Windows Media Player interface, but I'm
not sure iTunes would be any better, really. Library programs make me
nervous. OTOH, WMP does seem to be able to handle things when I move files
around and rename them, and those were the biggest problems I had in the old
days of library programs. So we'll see. mOcean sounds interesting, but I
have thus far avoided installing iTunes on my machine, and WMP11 has some
interesting new features which I want to check out, as soon as ptunes syncs
with it (if it doesn't already).
...snip...
Cheers,
Don
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