[Touch Pro2, Tilt 2 Themes and Apps] sleonard:
Requirements:

1) Has the ability to use the "Album Artist" tag to organize its library and not just the "Artist" tag. For those many who do not understand the importance of this let me say it makes a huge difference with CD's such as movie soundtracks, classical music CD's and other compilations that have one or more guest artists contributing on a particular track.

For example, take the soundtrack for "O Brother, Where Art Thou". There are 19 tracks and nearly every one by a different artist. If that one CD was the only CD on your TP2 and you opened the library of one of the current mobile media players and selected the "Artist" view you would see 19 different artists listed each owning the CD "O Brother, Where Art Thou". If instead the media player was able to organize its library by the "Album Artist" tag there would only be a single entry for "Various Artists" or "Original Soundtrack".

On a 16 GB SD card with several hundred ripped CD's this can be the difference between a managable artist list 200 long versus one that is 1000+ long and totally unmanagable.

2) Proper alphabetization; Ignores the words "A" and "The" if they begin an artist name. For example, "The Black Crowes" should be in the B's not the T's. It's OK that "Bob Dylan" be listed in the B's since there is no way to distinguish first and last names. I don't know of any media player on any platform that does this.

3) Uses a library Db created from tags and not just a folder/file structure. Can open a detailed properties view that gives extended info culled from tags and file data. (Genre, Audio format, etc.)

4) Has a "Finger-friendly" GUI and ideally can replace the HTC media player on the TF3D music tab.

Apps tested (so far)

1) HTC Media Player:

It's big plus is that it has a tab in TF3D so it is well integrated and easy to get to. It is also finger friendly. Unfortunately it does not utilize the "Album Artist" tag for organizing it's library (even though it does read the tag and display it when you view a music files properties). It also does not ignore "A" and "The" and places "The Black Crowes" under the T's. In addition I have found a bug that causes it to play tracks out of order. On most of the albums I've put on my SD card tracks 1 and 6 are switched (i.e. it shows and plays the tracks in the following order 6,2,3,4,5,1,7,8,9. On some albums the track order is even more random.

2) Windows Mobile Media Player:

"The Black Crowes" is properly listed in the B's but it also does not organize its library by the "Album Artist" tag (even though the full PC version of WMP does). Its default GUI is not very finger friendly, the buttons are a bit small and the library text is too small to be selected accurately with fingers. It is skinnable so I'm looking for one that fits the TP2's TF3D style and better suited to fingers versus a stylus. I'm also trying to put it on the TF3D music tab instead of the HTC media player.

3) Nitrogen:

Does not seem to utilize tags at all and instead relies on the folder structure and file names to organize music. It does have nice big buttons and is very finger friendly and the skin fits well in TF3D even though it is black text/buttons on a white background instead of TF3D's white on a black background.

4) S2P (Slide to Play):

Like Nitrogen it does not utilize tags at all and relies on the folder structure and file names to organize music. It is designed to be finger friendly and has an interesting GUI that makes good use of finger swipes and sliding panels.

5) ? Suggestions:

Most important is the album artist tag issue followed by the proper alphabetization. So far I prefer to use Windows Media Player but am still looking.

I've heard that Microsoft will be incorporating its Zune interface for the Windows mobile media player. I've never seen the Zune interface up close but I'm hoping it addresses the above shortcomings and, if so, bacomes avaiable to the TP2 soon.

S