WiFi and Winamp

[digiSal]

Even before I had wifi on the Axim I liked to read throught the wireless forums at Aximsite and others and I thought it was so cool to be able to control winamp from my bed. Rob had gotten me an IBM remote control for the PC that i never got to work. But the whole purpose was to be able to control winamp or my dvd player.

So when I had read about controlling Winamp with a Pocket PC i thought it was the coolest thing. So late last night and a little of today I was messing with a few Pocket PC apps that allow me to control whats playing in Winamp. The ones i have tested so far have been completely free.

[digiSal]

The first one I tried is called WAPsonic. Below is a screenshot. In order for this to work you have to create a free account at www.wapsonic.com and install the wapsonic plugin/server app. Once signed up you have to give them a cell phone number and an optional email address. The require a phone number because their target audience are people with GPRS enabled cell phones. I just put a fake number. The email address is where they send you a link to the webpage from which you control Winamp. Thats right, there is nothing to install on the Pocket PC. YOu just browse to the site they give you and can Raise the volume, pause, stop, go next or previous from Pocket IE. Pretty nifty ay? What I didnt like is that you cant browse for Songs or create playlists. You just basically have the basic controls. Cool idea though...

The screen shot below is of the configuration of the plugin and how it looks in IE Full Screen. IE full screen is accomplished with PIEPlus

[digiSal]

Next, was VinylServer from www.pocketwerks.com. Below is a screen shot. With this software you install the Server/Plugin on the PC and then install Client software on the Pocket PC. Setting up is easy enough. Tell it who the Server is, PC name or IP address, and tell it which folders on your PC contain MP3s. Once told where to look for songs it has to scan the directories to create a database of songs. Here is where things start to crap out. Apparently the scanning is very sensitive to the file names and lengths of songs and its not consistent. If you have wierd characters in a filename it will crash and close. So it wont just skip the song it will stop scanning. If you move the error box out the way you can sometimes see which song is the culprit. But sometimes you dont see anything wrong with the file name. And say you do delete a song that you know is causing problems it has to Rescan the entire directory again. So that sux, especially with a huge collection of MP3s.

The cool thing about this software is that you can create playlists and browse of MP3s, by Album, Artist, and Genre. Of course, these catergories require the MP3s to have the right ID3 tags. It will also display the Album cover off of the cd the song comes from. Way cool. I really like this software and I would have stopped searching for other ones if it wasnt for the Scanning/Crashing problems.


Below are a few screen shots of various Screens, including, PLaylist, Album VIew, Artist View, Genre View, Settings....stuff like that. Slick interface but that damned directory scanning...

Its free software that was once pay software....

[digiSal]

Next I will talk about the WInamp Controller that I has many of the features I want. But that doesnt mean I wont stop searching. There are some PayWare apps out there that I will definately be checking out. Stay Tuned...

--Sal-

EDIT: I must also say that these songs are not heard through the Pocket PC, this is merely a way to Remote Control Winamp (this is possible though and have done it succesfully, will get into that in another thread) . Just in case someout there misunderstands the purpose of these apps.

[digiSal]

browseAmp is the best one I have been able to find yet, that is free anyway. Below are screen shots. It works simalarily like wapsonic, except there is no registration and the page that you browse to resides on your PC. Your PC is pretty much actiing like a webserver because the winamp Controller that is loaded on the Pocket PC is a webpage.

The controller is skinable. If you know html or are familiar with coding you can alter the skins a little to better suit you. I for instance, removed the Refresh code and the time tracking. Time tracking was shown by the refreshing of the Controller page.  I have a lot of songs so loading all my files  so that i can browse them causes me to run out of memory. But the songs still get loaded onto Winamp.

By default the controller is not interfaced for the Pocket PC. But luckily someone has created a skin for the Pocket PC. The default skins are huge and have Album covers as well. So they can take awhile to load if used on the Pocket PC.  I have noticed a few bugs withing the Pocket PC skin. Sometimes the Next button wont work or an image will get red Xed. But a refresh fixes this right up.

I really like this winamp controller. The setting up is pretty is. You tell it which directories your songs are in, what info to display, log files, skins, ports, and stuff like that.....

Questions? Comments? Concerns?
 

[digiSal]

and again. I go full screen in Pocket Internet Explorer with PIEplus. I dont remember of Pocket IE (pie) will go full screen straight out of the box.... If not full screen you see the scroll bars and all that. Full screen looks a lot slicker this way.

Vinyl does not use Internet Explorer. It is an application that is install on the Pocket PC.

PIEplus can be found here:
http://www.reensoft.com/product/PIEPlus/

[digiSal]

and yet another way to control Winamp is to use VNC.

What is VNC? Virtual Network Computing....

I will get into it in a later post. For now, below is a screen shot of Winamp on my PC viewable on my Pocket PC.

[Weave]

This is neat... I have often wondered about having one PC and then hooking the PC to my home stereo and then being able to change tunes from another room... kinda like a multi room remote sorta...

Neat, as this would allow all of that to happen. Can you use this to shut down the main computer for the night from the room? Talk about the ultimate in LAZY!

[digiSal]

You can use VNC to shut down the computer and browesAmp has a button that says Shutdown, but it dont work... I probably have to adjust the link or something.

--Sal-