| Players: | Windows Mobile: Pocket Tunes 4.1 | CorePlayer 1.2.5 (also see THIS for a quick tutorial / overview) (also applicable for Symbian!) | WMP Mobile in WM 6.0 | Conduits Pocket Player 3.6 | Symbian: Nokia N95 Music Player | BlackBerry: BB OS 4.5 (official, final version; tests made on BB 8800) |
| Library based on… | Artist / Album / Genre / Playlist / Internet Radio | Artist / Album / Year / Genre / Rating / Play Count / Never Played / Stream Source / Top 50 favorites / Not Rated (screenshots: 1 2 3) | Artist / Album / Genre | Artist / Album / Genre / Release date / Contributing Artist. Playlists include a lot of differently (auto)-populated playlists, also based on rating. | Artist / Album / Genre / Composer; under Playlist, Most played tracks, Recently played songs and Recent additions | Artist / Album / Genre / Playlists |
| “All songs” view | + | + (“Current Selection” lists all the songs when no selection restriction is made in categories) | + | + (referred to as Songs) | + | + |
| Only one library, necessitating a card re-read after swapping? | No support for seamless swapping; however, file-system level renaming Application Data\ Pocket Tunes\ songdb.edb works | No support for seamless swapping; however, file-system level renaming Application Data\ CorePlayer\ library.db works. Manually created / populated playlists based on libraries, however, can be saved / loaded from inside CP. Unfortunately, while you can choose not to clean up non-existing library titles when creating the library of a new card manually (then, it could just skip the missing records during playback), this doesn’t work – missing titles will be removed | Excellent: Separate, card-specific libraries are stored on the card (MSMETADATA\ XMEMediaLibrary.mlb) and are visible as soon as you insert the card. | Media library location listed (and changeable) under Menu / More / Options / Library. This also means you can even store your libraries on the card they’re on – no need for manual file copying | Libraries are stored right on the card (Private / some auto-generated name / harvesterdb); cards are, therefore, very easy to swap | Surely not on the card and it forgets the contents of the previous card upon inserting a new – that is, not swapping-friendly at all |
| Library scanning: ex/including folders? | You can only you can exclude the My Documents folder on the device (Prefs/ General/ Look for songs in internal memory) | See icons in “Auto / manual scan” row | - (only full scan) | Menu / More / Options / Library/ Folders | - (only full scan) | - (only full scan) |
| MP3 scanning speed (2136 titles taking up ~7.5G on a 8G class 4 Sandisk microSD card)? | 3:00 | 8:44 | 9:10 | 7:20 | 23:01 | 12:00 |
| HE-AACv2 scanning speed? | 2G: 2:15; 4G: 4:50 | 2G: 9m; 4G: 15m. On the Nokia N95, 4G: 46m | (couldn’t test because it’s not AAC-compatible on non-phone devices) | (couldn’t test because it’s not AAC-compatible on non-phone devices) | 2G:19m | 4G: 18m |
| Background file / library scanning supported? | + | + | - | + (in auto mode?) | - | + |
| Auto / manual scan? With the latter, scanning initiation? | Auto only: when entering the Choose Song menu, it kicks in immediately; all the time | Both. Manual: In Media Library view, Database / Scanned Folders: after adding the root of the file system with the leftmost plus icon, Scan Folders (right softkey) | Both (manual: Menu / Update Library) | Both; auto by default. You can also force a manual scan after unchecking Menu / More / Options / Library/ Automatically scan for media and, then clicking Scan Now | Both: manual: Options / Refresh | Auto only |
| Speed of library traversing with a lot of entries | Slow | Very fast. Note that you need to click the OK mark after selecting a subcategory | Very fast | Very fast | Much faster than Pocket Tunes 4.1 on WM; still slower than CorePlayer | Very fast |
| Social networks: Song transfer options from inside the library | - | - | - | - | +; in addition to the traditional transfer methods, flickr and VOX upload (also supports account creation) | - (only Send as Email and via Bluetooth supported) |
| Auto / manual ranking system? If supported, can it be synched back to desktop WMP? | - | +; nope | + (too bad you can’t sort based on this); nope | + | - | - |
| Manual database comment adding / tag editing? | - | + (see the Edit icon in the Current Selection / (playlist-based) Now Playing-list and the last-but-one screenshot HERE); also THIS. You’ll also be able to base your library searches on these (even multiple) keywords. (One song can only have one keyword, though.) | - | - | + (Options / Song info; all major fields can be modified and comments added; changes are only applied to the DB and not written back to the file) | - |
| Artist, Album / Contributing artist separation? (See THIS) | n/t | n/t | n/t | + | - | n/t |
| Multiple same-level category selection to greatly speed up creating playlists / selecting multiple categories to listen to | - | + (great!) | - | - | - | - |
| Creating playlists based on library? | + | + (when you press the leftmost OK mark, you get straight into Playlist creation mode) | + (Queue Up on individual songs / albums / categories; then, go to Now playing. There, you can already save a playlist (Menu / Save Playlist). | + Only after moving from the iPhone-like touch handling to playing. No multiple selection is possible; titles must be added one-by-one in this view. However, now, switching back to the Library view (Browse – left softkey), going back to the main selector screen and, there, Playlist, select Save Current Playlist… and then name and save it | + (Options / Add to a playlist with local playlist selection / creation: Saved / New playlist) | + (Menu / Add to playlist) |
| Other playlist goodies: sort (TCPMP: only title, of course) | - (only manual Up/Down songs: pretty awkward as it doesn’t have its own icon, always have to go to Menu / Move Song Up / Down) | Sorting by Duration / Artist / Album / Track Nr / Title / File Extension / Date Added / Play Counter / Date Last Played / Stream Path | - (only manual, individual up/down; fortunately, there’re icons for this task – in addition to the menu items for one-handed and MS Smartphone use –, unlike with Pocket Tunes) | Title /Artist / Album / File Name; this also in reverse order | - (Not any kind of sorting capabilities) | Nothing (Shuffle only) |
| Quick find | n/t | Really rudimentary: only able to position to the first letter and only with hardware keyboards / dialpads (SIP keyboard can’t be invoked from inside). This should be improved! | +; excellent; must be initiated from keyboard / SIP (no separate menu entry, unlike on BB or Pocket Player) | +; full search (initiated by the Search top-level item, unlike with WMP or Nokia’s player and like that of BB). Decidedly slower than WMP and doesn’t highlight hits | + ; much more restricted than in the other clients: only searches for the beginning of the titles; must be initiated from keyboard / dialpad (no separate menu entry, unlike on BB) | +; in any category, anywhere in names |
| Other screenshots | - | - | - | - | - | Screenshot of media player options |
