[General Topics] Menneisyys:
2nd MM Bible sneak peek:crossfade/gapless playback, media compatibility&power usage

You may already know I’m working very hard on my forthcoming Multimedia Bible. The first “sneak peek”, on radio station streaming, has already been published and got pretty good feedback.

Now, I present the second installment: a vastly enhanced version of my previous, well-known and, for example, Pocket PC Thoughts-frontpaged article “Everything you will ever need to know about the power consumption of Pocket PC audio players”, with battery life tests of ALL compatible (and more widely used) formats of all major media players, on all the three major (consumer mainstream – hence no Linux or Blackberry) mobile platforms: Windows Mobile, Symbian S60 and Palm OS. I also present a detailed elaboration on the media format compatibility of these players (and platforms), paying special attention to the new and freaking good and storage-friendly HE-AAC v2 format. You’re REALLY supposed to read that article to get a complete picture of what the percentages in this guide are all about and how you can further reduce battery usage.

That’s not everything! I also present thorough reports on crossfade and gapless playback. This subject has been widely discussed in the mobile community and a lot of misconceptions and plain bad info flying around. Here, I present a 100% dependable and reliable, full overview of everything you need to know about this question.

What’s missing from this roundup?

Note that, as opposed to the previous power usage-related article, I haven’t retested the MP3-only and, generally, VERY old and not recommended titles that haven’t been updated in the meantime. This is why they aren’t present in the article / chart.

Also note that 40th Floor’s iPlay has been upgraded in the meantime (and a brand new product, Phantasm, has been released), but its trial version is uselessly crippled – much more so than iPlay. As I’m one of the few billion people that is banned from iPlay’s web sites (they seem to ban countries / ISP’s in a completely random way – most, if not all, of Europe is banned from there), I don’t even have the chance of buying the product, as I, in situations like this, would. (For example, for this Bible to be as thorough as possible – and to avoid having to ask for freebies –, I’ve purchased Pocket Music and Nero Mobile Pro. I’ve also purchased the Symbian and Pocket PC versions of CorePlayer (along with their third product, CoreAVC, for the desktop). I think the latter should be done by everyone that uses TCPMP – the original developer of TCPMP certainly deserves financial support, even as a “thank you!” for TCPMP’s unparalleled superiority on Windows Mobile and Palm OS.)

I haven’t included thundershadow14’s PocketMelody either because the development is still at its early stages. However, it’s a worthy product keeping an eye on.

I have also left out the current MPlayer port because it’s, at its current state, is pretty much useless except for some given tasks (for example, HTTP RealAudio streaming). It has the following CPU usage figures: 22% for MP3; 77%(!) for OGG; 28% for LC AAC; 17%(!) for HE-AAC. As can be seen, there isn’t much point in using it for music playback unless you have a non-phone device (meaning no AAC support in the system), haven’t purchased CorePlayer and want to play back HE-AAC (the native iTunes format). (CorePlayer is the only really battery-friendly solution for playing back HE-AAC content on these kinds of handhelds – all the other players consume way more power.) Unfortunately, it doesn’t support HE-AAC v2.

The chart is HERE. Comments are welcome, as usual.

Let me elaborate on the results. First, let’s take a look on what formats are supported and what CPU usage the reviewed players cause.

1. Format compatibility and power (battery) usage

Let’s separate the ‘old’, well-known formats like MP3, WMA and OGG from the “new” and, with HE-AAC v2 - particularly when it comes to streaming (the subject of my previous audio streaming “sneak peek”), pretty much revolutionary AAC formats.

Note that, in here, I’ve only listed the most commonly used formats. In the final version of the Bible, I’ll also include speech formats (for example, AMR or Speex) and losless formats like FLAC.

1.1 MP3, WMA and OGG

The “old” formats have pretty good support. MP3, which is played back by all the players, is best played back in CorePlayer (CPU usage-wise), but GSPlayer and (as was already the case with the old, 3.x series) Resco Audio Recorder is pretty close too when it comes to extending battery life.

OGG isn’t so widely supported; the winners are GSPlayer and CorePlayer. TCPMP, Pocket Music and Pocket Player aren’t left behind much either; MortPlayer and, particularly, Nero Mobile Pro, is. On Symbian, you’ll want to prefer LCG Jukebox. CorePlayer, as you’ll see later, isn’t really battery-friendly with short(er) titles.

To play back WMA, you’ll most probably want to use the (in Windows Mobile) built-in Pocket WMP (Windows Media Player), albeit GSPlayer is also very good and the later versions of Pocket Player, unlike with previous ones, also play them back pretty well. Under Symbian, the current (beta) version of CorePlayer is almost useless, WMA-wise; on the other hand, the (in S60v3) built-in WMA support of the factory Music Player is excellent. On Palm, Pocket Tunes also supports WMA (I couldn’t test this because of the trial restrictions.)