[General Topics] Menneisyys:
1.3 Equalizers / bass boost and battery use; MortPlayer

The battery usage of enabled equalizers / bass boost code is pretty battery-friendly with the most widely known / used generic multimedia players, except for, maybe, CorePlayer, where CPU usage pretty much increases with the equalizer enabled. (Note that with these apps, not in the previous test were there really bad results.) Using the equalizer in the two apps (VITO SoundExplorer and Resco Audio Recorder) that also behaved very bad in the past test are still in no way recommended: they can easily quadruple (!) the CPU usage with enabled equalizer.

It’s worth noting that MortPlayer is still closely mimicking the behavior of GSplayer – with the exception that it (still) has slightly (not much!) worse battery usage, except for the MP3 and the OGG case. In the latter cases, GSplayer has significantly lower battery usage and, therefore, should be preferred – unless you MUST use MortPlayer for its, for example, large on-screen buttons.

2. Crossfade effects, gapless playback and reopening the audio channel

Let’s talk a bit about crossfade effects and/or gapless playback. I’ve long searched for a CD that would it make possible to reliably test the incompatibility problems some players might have. Fortunately, at last, I’ve found one – a(n, otherwise, pretty bad) Finnish language audio play (Jerry Cotton G-mies - Kostaja Sing Singistä, Poptori, ISBN: 6415732306353), which has an excellent, gapless track structure to be used to find anomalies / bugs in the players. For example, track 10 on CD1 abruptly ends with a sentence. PocketMind’s Pocket Music (one of the very few apps to explicitly support gapless playback), with the default settings, just chops this sentence off. Fortunately, this is caused by (default) a (not really working – read the Wiki article on gapless playback so that understand how it SHOULD work as opposed to the current state) padding-removing functionality. It seems it was really worth thoroughly testing gapless playback with this CD: I’ve found a bug that, otherwise, would cause a lot of problems to many Windows Mobile users.

As can clearly be seen, Pocket Player is WAY better than anything else out there – in not only the gapless playback being flawless, but also in the cross-fade effect. On Windows Mobile, the only other player offering something similar, Pocket Music, is way worse in this respect. On Palm OS, Pocket Tunes is equally excellent, crossfade-wise.

2.1 Reopening the audio channel

Note that the second test (second row) in this group elaborates on the hardware equalizers I’ve elaborated on for example HERE. For example, HTC’s hardware equalizer just re-sets the audio channel when skipping to the next song, which may be a major pain in the back – you’ll end up having to dis-, and, then, re-enable the equalizer applet again and again, after every track change. (Note that the latest, 0.10 version of x50mix prevents at least the Dell Axim and Fujitsu-Siemens users from happening this. That is, it’s only newer phones that MUST rely on the, in this regard, inferior HTC Equalizer.) This has resulted in a lot of disgruntled XDA-Devs users.

Fortunately, in this respect, more (even free: GSPlayer) players are flawless (unlike the built-in WMP). This means if you do plan to use the hardware equalizer (for example, not to suffer from the additional power drain caused by the built-in equalizer in several players), you’ll want to select your player accordingly.

Note that you not only want to prefer players that have a “+” in here when you have to use an external, hardware equalizer like the already-mentioned HTC Equalizer. The reason for this is that, in order to achieve this kind of functionality, an audio player must NOT close and reopen the output audio channel between songs. The ones that don’t do this, generally, don’t cause any annoying noise (which can be very important on several Windows Mobile models) when switching tracks and may also be faster at doing this. Therefore, you might want to prefer players that are able to do this over ones that don’t, particularly if yours is a “noisy” Windows Mobile handset. With models like that, players that don’t close and reopen the output channel (or, are configurable not to do so), will be a godsend for you.