GSPlayer Review
February 13, 2006
Introduction
The ability to playback music on your cell phone is certainly a convenient feature. The new Treo 700w ships with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile for Pocket PC. While it certainly does an adequate job of playing and organizing your music, many users often complain that it is a very resource intensive program and makes poor utilization of precious screen space – leaving them to seek an alternative. That’s where GSPlayer by Green Software comes into the picture.
User Interface
Upon launching GSPlayer, you are immediately greeted with a layout that makes very good use of the available screen real estate. The main screen displays the current track number, elapsed time, encoding information, progress bar,control buttons, and (most notably) the currently loaded playlist in a scrollable window. Having a list of queued tracks on the main screen makes it a snap to skip tracks and find the exact song you want to hear. The list is easily navigated by using the up/down buttons on the 5-way navigator. Pressing the center button quickly selects and plays the currently highlighted tracks.
Adding files to your playlist can be easily done by pressing the eject symbol on the button bar,or by opening the menu and choosing file and open file or add file - open file will clear your current playlist and add the chosen files, while add file will place the selected tracks at the end of your playlist.
While the buttons on the main player screen are slightly smaller than desired, in our testing, it wasn’t necessary to consistently use them. With the ability to scroll songs using the 5-way navigation button and having the left action key set to play/stop, one handed operation is a breeze. While some of the more advanced features of the application are buried a couple layers deep in the menu, you have all the basics at your fingertips.
Features & Options
GSPlayer touts the following features:
- MP3 playback using the MAD 0.15.0b
- Ogg Vorbis playback
- Wave format playback
- HTTP streaming playback (MP3 / Ogg Vorbis)
- SHOUTcast streaming playback (MP3 / Ogg Vorbis)
- ID3 v1/v1.1 support
- PLS/M3U playlist support
- 10 bands equalizer (MP3 playback only)
- Surround / Bassboost effects
- Reverb / Echo effects
- Skin support
- Hardware button mapping
- Noiseless playback (See decoder tab in options dialog)
- Sleep Timer
- Hold (Lock hardware buttons)
Issues and Notes
The biggest note on this software is that it is still listed as being in beta development for Windows Mobile 2005, so there are inevitably still bugs in the software. No mention has been made on when the final stable version is set to be released. We also came across a very significant issue that needs to be brought to attention. On our 700w, when we set GSPlayer to be associated with the mp3 file type, it caused our mp3 ringtones to stop working. After removing the association, our ringtones immediately started working again. One other issue users need to be aware of revolves around button mapping. If you choose to customize buttons for different functions, be aware that there may be adverse side effects
when attempting to navigate the menus. For example, if you assign the right button on the 5-way navigation be the ‘volume up’ function, the next time you go into a menu on the main screen, instead of the right button opening a sub list of a menu, it will still be controlling the volume.
Conclusion
While there are still certain aspects of the program that clearly need to be worked out, GSPlayer is still a good alternative to the bundled Windows Media Player for playing your music. The free application responds quickly and makes eloquent use of available screen space. We are certainly looking forward to a stable release for WM5 and to put some of the more advanced features to use.
For more information, please visit Green Software.
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