Hack 25. Listen to Music
Turn your Palm into a portable music player. The first step in listening to music is to find some music to listen to. The major music players for Palm devices (AeroPlayer and Pocket Tunes) both play MP3s and Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) files. Ogg Vorbis is a nice format because it isn't patent-encumbered.
There are various sources for music:
4.4.1. Copy Music from Your PC to Your PalmIn addition to actually having some music to download to your Palm, you need a few more things. If you want to listen to more than a few songs, then you need to have a memory card for your Palm device. For a Sony Clié, that means you need a Memory Stick or Memory Stick Pro. For a Palm-branded device, you need an SD or MMC card. Pick a card that will hold as much music as you want to carry with you, plus has enough space for anything else (like videos) that you might want. A typical song (four minutes long) requires 3.84 MB, so if you get a 512 MB memory card, you can store up to 133 songs. Note that the size of a song depends primarily on two things: the quality it was recorded at (e.g., a song recorded at 44 kHz requires twice as much memory as one recorded at 22 kHz) and the length of the song. Thus, if you have a choice of quality on songs, you can get more songs by picking songs at a lower quality. If you have a flash memory card reader that you can plug into your PC, now's the time to use it. There are few things slower than copying large files to your Palm over HotSync. Because these readers are inexpensive (typically under $30), they are well worth the money for the convenience they give you. When you plug the memory card into the card reader, and the card reader into your PC, the card will appear as a hard drive attached to your computer. Copy the files to the /Audio folder on the card, and then safely eject the card reader from your computer; on a Windows PC, right-click on the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the system tray (on the lower right of your screen) and select Safely remove USB Mass Storage Device. On a Mac, drag the drive to the Trash to eject it.
If you want to use HotSync to copy the files, the next step depends on which type of device you have. 4.4.1.1. Sony Clié.The next thing you need to do is install software on your PC to support transferring songs to the card on your Clié. This program is called "Data Export" and is only available on Windows machines. If you didn't install it when you initially installed the Palm Desktop software, then you will need to install it now off of the original CD. Your PDA should already have the "Data Import" application installed. If not, then you will need to install it from the original CD as well. The next step is to use the Data Export (PC side) and Data Import (PDA side) programs to transfer your music to the memory card in your PDA. 4.4.1.2. Palm-branded device.To transfer music (or other files) to an SD card on a Palm-branded device, use the Quick Install program on the desktop. Then just do a normal HotSync to transfer the files. 4.4.2. Listening to MusicYour device may have a built-in player (such as Real Player) that you can use to listen to the music that you copied over. If your Palm device did not include a music player, then you can download either AeroPlayer (http://www.aerodrome.us/), as seen in Figure 4-11 or Pocket Tunes (http://www.pocket-tunes.com/) as seen in Figure 4-12. There is also MMPlayer (http://www.mmplayer.com), which can play movies as well as music (see Figure 4-13). MMPlayer can also play music and videos from internal memory in addition to playing from a memory card. If you are only going to use internal memory, though, you will be limited in how much music you can store. But if you only want to store a couple of songs, then you can save yourself the expense of a memory card. The Kinoma Player (http://www.kinoma.com) also plays music and videos and can play music and video out of internal memory. Try the demo versions of these programs and see which you prefer. Figure 4-11. AeroPlayerThe programs will automatically detect and load the music files from the memory card or internal memory and will give you a default playlist with all of the songs listed. You can also create separate playlists that cover a subset of the songsfor example, "morning wake-up songs" and "evening unwind songs." Figure 4-12. Pocket TunesFigure 4-13. MMPlayerYou can listen to songs with the built-in speaker if you have to, but you are better off using a set of headphones. The quality will be much better and you will be less likely to annoy people around you (well, at least by playing musicif you're annoying in other ways, the headphones won't help). Look for headphones with a volume controlthat will make it easier to adjust the volume without having to fumble around with your PDA. See http://www.headphone.com for lots of details on headphones. Once you have your playlist set and are actually listening to music, then you get to uncover the secret of the "Hold" button that many Palm devices have. This is usually an alternate position of the power slider on the Palm device. What this does is shut off the screen while leaving the Palm running so you can listen to music without killing your battery. Note, however, that a Palm device is probably not going to beat a dedicated digital music player for battery life, even with the screen off. Tapwave Zodiac users can put the device into Hold while playing music by pressing the menu button and selecting Hold from the Options menu. The Zodiac will also switch into Hold automatically when the automatic shut-off timer is reached. The Zodiac seems to run a custom music player. If it works for you, great. If not, try one of the alternatives to see if it meets your needs. |