New Pocket PC Phone/Windows Mobile Media Player Problems

September 27, 2006 7:41 PM

Sprint PPC/6700 Pocket PC Phone

I recently got a HTC PPC-6700 Phone. I have been having a number of problems getting it to work for my liking. One thing I do like is the ability to play MP3 files view Windows Mobile Media Player. I added a 2 gig mini SD card and now I sync stuff to my phone.

Earbuds? Are they really buddies?

Many phones and MP3 players really give you crappy earbud/headsets. Indeed I even hate the ones that Apple gives you for the iPod. Fashionable? Perhaps. But definitely not comfortable and in general they don't sound good. I found a good pair by Sony. Comfortable and sound good. But alas my Creative MP3 player (indeed most MP3 players) use a 3.5 MM stereo plug. This phone uses a 2.5 MM plug. Plus it has not 2 but 3 sections on the plug's sleeve - 2 for stereo and one for the mic.
I had gotten a pair of earbuds that were kinda cool because I could listen to MP3's and when a call comes in simply push one button and the music would stop and I could hold a conversation. Hang up and right back to my tunes. Cool! But this set of earbuds were very unwieldy, thick, heard noise when you rubbed the wires and had this weird metal thing that was supposed to connect to some connector on some phones I guess. My phone doesn't have them. I guess it's for smaller phones and iPods so that you can dangle the MP3 player around your neck. For me it was just a nuisance. Then these broke in that the wire shorted out. What a waste!

Earbud Solution

But I liked the idea of being able to take a call while listening to music. How to hook up my current good set of earbuds with this 2.5 MM connection??? Then I found this adapter at Seido Online. Perfect! Now I can use my preferred earbuds with not only my phone, but with my Belkin Radio Transmitter for my car.

More Windows Mobile Media Player Troubles

But that hardly means my troubles with Windows Media Player are over! One thing that's a problem is that when you're playing MP3 files and you put the phone back in it's holster, it tends to hit the buttons, particularly the joystick, and change or stop the song. You can also accidentally and randomly dial people. Not good. So most devices have some sort of locking mechanism. Often it's a hardware switch but here, in Pocket PC land, it's a software switch or a button you tap on the Today screen. I moved it to the top of the Today screen so that it's easier to get to via the joystick.

Interrupt Handling

OK so you're cruising along digging on some tunes and you need to interact with another human (oh bother!). What do you need to do?

1. Unbuckle the holster
2. Remove the phone
3. Either get out the stylus or use your fat fingers
4. Tap Unlock
5. Tap Unlock again (Unlocking is a two step procedure)
6. Bring up Media Player (I've rebound the IE key to be the Media key as I use that more)
7. Tap Pause

To get back to the music:

1. Power on the phone (if it powered off)
2. Bring up Media Player (if necessary)
3. Tap Play
4. Tap Start and select Today screen (Haven't found any other place or shortcut key that will lock device!)
5. Tap Lock Device
6. Re-holster the phone
7. Buckle holster

OK you say, a number of steps but not too hard. But wait! There's more...

Corrupted Playlists

What I would like is an easy and quick way to pause playback, talk to the other person, then resume playback. Is that really asking for too much?!? I found that while the device is locked (and it needs to be locked - see above) the power button is indeed active. And if you hit the power button it will stop playback. Hitting the power button and it resumes playback... but only for a second or two. Then it stops and the playlist get corrupted (see below).
Windows Mobile Media Player has this very annoying habit of forgetting or corrupting the playlist and/or loosing track of where it was in the song. AFAICT if you power off as described above your playlist will be corrupted and your place will be lost. An exception to this is if the device is not locked, you power off and then power back on relatively quickly. Also, if you say pause the playback in WMP and say go into the store. When you return the phone will first turn off the blacklight (see Start: Settings: System: Backlight) and then power down the phone (under Start: Settings: System: Power). I believe if you hit that power down time (mine's configured at 2 minutes) then again, WMP will corrupt the playlist and lose your place.
A corrupted playlist is not fatal. It shows itself by going into WMP then Now Playing. You'll see entries for every song in the playlist but they all say Unknown now. Sometimes you'll see nothing. In these cases WMP has reset itself back to the internal card of the phone (all my songs are on my 2 gig storage card). You can clear the condition by switching to the internal card then back to the storage card then back to your playlist. However now you have to also find the song that was playing and seek to where you left off. Extreme bother!!!

Interrupt Handler Overflow

As a series of steps, when this condition occurs you need to:

1. Switch to WMP (if necessary - I do this by hitting the IE key which I bound to WMP))
2. Select Now Playing
3. Select the "Playlist" button. This is the icon of a sheet of paper with a right pointing "play" triangle and what appears to be a green plus sign. It's on the second to bottom row to the right of the up and down arrows. It's a small button and is only accessible via a tap - tough to do with a fat thumb! And there is no keystroke way to do this AFAICT.
4. Select the Library drop down just below where the Start menu would be. It has a magnifying glass just to the left of it. This button is also not keystroke available and you must tap it but at least it's a bigger button...
5. Select Storage Card from the drop down
6. Select My Playlists
7. Select playlist in question
8. Hunt in the playlist for the song you were listening to (if you remember it!)
9. Select Play
10. Use the unwieldy WMP slider to attempt to seek to where you were

Additionally the WMP slider, while controllable from the joystick in order to seek or rewind the control is choppy at best. Seeking or rewinding causes the playback to "skip" not unlike a stone skipping across a body of water. What's worse is you can let go of the joystick and it'll still skip for anywhere from 2-10 seconds more! Horrible and unsmooth and trying to use the slider with a thumb or finger is difficult and a stylus only slightly better.

Synching Issues

Being as I have like 15 gig of media and only a 2 gig card obviously I can only sync a subset. The idea is to sync the most recent subset. There are a number of podcasts I subscribe to including a radio show I've been quite fond of called The Tom Leykis Show as well as a bunch of podcasts that I subscribe to through iTunes (Don't get me started on iTunes and podcast troubles! That's a whole 'nother blog entry!). Plus I wanted to make sure I synced some of my music - a random and fresh variety of music - so when I was tired of the talk I could switch to music. But alas WMP on the PC (which is what is used to sync to the PPC) allows autoplaylists and I can configure one to give me a variety of music limited to say 500 Meg, once created that list was static. IOW it doesn't regenerate itself!
So I wrote a Perl script called mkplaylist that scans my some 4500 songs and picks out 100 at random writing a Windows Playlist and I sync that playlist to the PPC. I added some rudimentary filtering capabilities like having it skip the talk related genres then cron it to run once a week.
I also have a playlist called "New Tom" and "New Podcasts". Essentially those are the only playlists I sync to the PPC. "New Tom" and "New Podcasts" are relatively dynamic due to a filter setting saying "Play Count = 0". So if I play any "songs" in "New Tom" or "New Playlists" then they magically drop off the list since Play Count becomes greater than 0. However, I don't play them on WMP on the PC! Additionally, for the podcasts, being relatively transient in nature (meaning after I listen to the podcast I want it to disappear from my system) need to be played in iTunes which will notice the play count > 0 and delete the track while refreshing the podcast feed with new stuff. Otherwise a build up occurs.
So basically I need to get the fact that I played a song on the phone back to both WMP and iTunes so that they know I've listened to the track. I had little hope that it would ever get back to iTunes being that's Apple software and Apple and Microsoft haven't been known to work cooperatively. However I had hope when I looked at the properties of MP3 tracks on the phone and noticed a Play Count. Additionally Play Count increased as expected when the track was played on the phone. Could this valuable information be synced back to WMP on the PC when I did my ActiveSync?!? Well of course not! Why not?!? Ugh!