In this post, I am going to talk about Microsoft’s Windows Media variants: Windows Media Player 11, Origami Experience, and Windows Media Center.  For many UMPC owners, I’m sure these are essentially the default choices for music playback.  On my eo v7110, I pretty much exclusively used a combination of WMP and Origami Experience and they were the first players that I tried on my Vye as well.  In time, I found them to fall short of many of my needs, though.  I eventually tried a few other products and ended up selecting Media Monkey as my preferred music player.  In the near future, I will write up a separate post entirely about that product.

Finding the right music player for use on my Vye was essential as it is one of my key uses.  I have a big CD collection that I have accumulated over many years and have put a lot of time and effort into ripping them all to digital copies.  My wish to have my whole library on my UMPC was a major motivator in buying the Vye and upgrading it to a 250GB hard drive.

Part of the reason for the large size of my collection is that only a fairly small percentage of it consists of typical 10 track or so pop albums.  Instead, I have a very extensive collection of film scores and compilations as well as quite a bit of classical, Broadway and film musicals, and other similarly specialized music.  In those genres, many of the CDs approach the 75 minute maximum and frequently have large numbers of fairly short tracks.  My collection includes over 1,400 albums with over 26,000 separate tracks.

When I first started the process of copying my CDs to digital files, hard disk space was a lot more expensive than it is now.  In order to limit the space needed a bit, I stuck with MP3 files at 128 kbps.  The sound quality on that isn’t bad, but certainly could be better.  Now that you can get a terabyte of storage for not too much more than $200, I’ve been re-ripping the entire collection in the lossless, open-source FLAC format.  Obviously, those files are still too big to be practical for the Vye.  For the portable use, I have converted each of the FLAC files to 128kbps WMA files, which are roughly the same size as the old MP3 versions, but with a better sound quality.

A music library this large does tend to be a bit of a challenge for most digital jukebox software.  That is a lot of meta data to keep track of and I also need a user interface that doesn’t make it too overwhelmingly difficult to locate whatever particular music I am looking for at any given time.

After the jump, I go into a more in-depth discussion of the 3 Windows Media based music players.

Windows Media Player 11

Windows Media Player, which is included with Windows, is not really a media player that is particularly well optimized for portable computers, much less those with relatively small touch screens.  It is essentially a front-end for the underlying media management features of the operating system, though, meaning that it is likely to at least somewhat come into play on any system.  Its underlying API is the heart of other Microsoft media players like Media Center and Origami Experience and even most third party music players at least make use of some features of WMP, particularly for playing protected content.

The standard WMP interface is clearly not at all designed for, or friendly to, touch screen devices.  The controls are almost without exception too small to manage effectively via touch and the displays often do not scale all that well to the 1024×600 display.  It is useable, but far from being very friendly.

My biggest issue with WMP (and its variants) is that it just doesn’t handle large libraries very well.  With a small to moderate library, the performance is fairly snappy, but the more tracks that are added, the more it slows down.  With a library as large as mine, it tends to be a bit sluggish even on fairly fast machines (like my Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM desktop system) and it definitely has a hard time keeping up on a fairly slow system like the Vye.

Another big problem that I have with Windows Media Player is apt to be an issue for many UMPC users, which is its inability to handle libraries that change frequently, particularly if some files previously in the library may end up no longer available.   This has been an issue for me as I have been re-converting my library and regularly swapping out older versions of tracks, but it is also very likely to be an issue for anyone with a smaller hard drive that might want to keep music on a portable drive (or memory card) or generally rotate music in and out of their library.

Microsoft has pretty much made the assumption that all library manipulation will be purely done inside of WMP and, thus, has little tolerance for dynamically changing libraries.  There is no capability for re-scanning the library with any purpose other than simply adding new tracks.  It can’t automatically remove tracks from the library that no longer exist on the hard drive, nor can it re-scan the meta tags on existing files to update their entries in the library.  Even changing the tags on media within WMP doesn’t always write those tags back out to the file, preventing those changes from being seen elsewhere or if the library is re-generated.

As noted at the beginning of this article, I have a long-term project going on to re-rip my library.  That has also included a lot of re-working of the tags on existing tracks to get everything better organized.  Most of this happens on my desktop system and is later synched to the Vye.  With WMP, the only option is to go into my user directory, blow away the library file, and then re-scan the whole thing.  This process typically takes a couple hours with such a large library.  Even re-scanning to add new music that was ripped somewhere other than WMP (such as on a desktop system) can take a pretty long time.

Origami Experience

Despite some big limitations, I actually used Origami Experience pretty extensively as a primary music player on my eo v7110.  I was not entirely satisfied with the navigational performance or the flexibility of the user interface, but it did generally work better than most alternatives.  Under Vista, I found that the audio quality on the eo was generally best with Windows Media Player and its variants and the interface was much more useable on a 7-inch touch-screen than the stock WMP interface.

Installing Origami Experience on the Vye turned out to be something of a challenge as Microsoft unwisely put restrictions on the installer designed to prevent people from installing the software on anything other than a UMPC.  Unfortunately, these restrictions prevent it from being installed on a number of devices where it really should work, including the Vye.  I’m not entirely certain, but I believe the 1024×600 resolution of the screen is what the installer believed to be outside of specifications.  Fortunately, UMPC Portal published instructions for modifying the installer to remove those restrictions and following those directions easily allowed me to install the software on the Vye.

I had two major complaints with Origami Experience on the eo and both still apply on the Vye as well.  First of all, the user interface is very touch-friendly and generally looks good, but it isn’t particularly flexible.  My biggest problem with the interface is that it really only allows single level navigation by either album, genre, title, or artist.  With such a large library, it helps to be able to narrow the selection down further.  To be specific, I have carefully organized all of my collection into a core set of genres, but Origami Experience doesn’t provide any way to drill down from genre to album or artist.

Performance is an even bigger problem with Origami Experience and I was surprised that it really isn’t much better on the Vye than it was on the eo.  It can take as long as 30-40 seconds to bring up the music library and allow selection of albums or tracks.  This is obviously a reflection of the general performance issues surrounding Windows Media Player and large libraries, but it really seems to be a problem that is amplified quite a lot with Origami Experience.

I used Origami Experience a lot on the eo mainly because there really wasn’t an alternative that was all that much better, but I really spent fairly little time using it on the Vye.  On the faster, more powerful system, its limitations stand out more.  I probably will give the upcoming version 2.0 a chance when it becomes available, but the first version just isn’t a great choice on the Vye.

Windows Media Center

Vista Ultimate (as well as the Home Premium version that is usually included with the Vye) includes the Windows Media Center, another WMP front-end.  While it is really intended for across-the-room use on a TV screen, it is also a pretty decent interface for a small touch-screen.  In many ways, the interface is actually fairly similar to that of Origami Experience, although it is definitely more flexible and much more refined.

The interface includes pretty extensive options for navigating through a large library, immediately making it much more useful for me than Origami Experience.  When navigating by genre, drilling down further gives a list of all albums within that genre, which I previously noted was a serious shortcoming of Origami Experience for my use.  Media Center gives pretty full access to the various commands available in Media Player, including the ability to edit tags or even delete items from the library or entirely from the hard drive.  This makes it more of a complete alternate interface.

As I noted, the interface is "decent" for touch-screen, but it isn’t ideally suited for it.  The icons for selecting titles and menu items tend to be large, which works well.  The "now playing" screen and other displays are full-screen with large print, which also works well on the small screen.  On the other hand, scroll arrows and playback controls are all clearly designed for use with a remote control or mouse and tend to be pretty hard to use with touch.

My favorite feature of Media Center is the slide-show feature.  From the "now playing" screen, an option to start a slide-show is always available.  The photos are then presented in full-screen, but you can keep the current track information (including album art) in the bottom left corner of the screen.  Playback controls are also available at any time without having to interrupt the slide-show.  While Origami Experience does offer a slide-show as well, it isn’t nearly as slick or easy to use.  My only real complaint is that Windows Media Player doesn’t allow separate folders to be specified for music and photos, which means that I have to periodically manually purge album art images from the photo library.

The big downside to Media Center is, once again, performance.  On the eo, it performed so poorly that it was simply not usable.  It does work considerably better on the Vye, but it still has a tendency to slow way down or even come to pretty much a full halt occasionally.  Probably the worst problem is that it will sometimes simply become non-responsive after I start music playing.  In these cases, the music will continue to play uninterrupted (and with no disruption in sound quality), but I will have no access to any controls for a period of time.  This includes the volume control, which can be a particular issue when first starting music playing.  After 30 seconds or so, it does eventually free up.

Response times can also be pretty sluggish while navigating menus as well, particularly when first displaying a page of albums or songs.  Album art is used as the primary means of presenting music choices, but it can often take quite a while for Media Center to load in and display all the artwork on a given page of items.  This results in an initial display of a bunch of light blue boxes with the title printed in white text, but with the album art slowly popping up in replacement over time.  This wouldn’t be so bad, but the system is pretty non-responsive while the art is loading.  It doesn’t cache this well either as returning to the same list of albums/tracks later typically repeats the same process.

Closing thoughts

I realize that I have a somewhat unusual situation due to the size of my music library.  It is probably on the large side compared to the amount of music that most people manage on their desktop systems and it certainly is a very large library for using on a small device like a UMPC.  Still, my library is what it is and it does result in substantially degraded usability for Windows Media Player based products.

At this point, Media Center does have the best interface that I have yet found for a small touchscreen device like this and I also think that Origami Experience is an attractive and generally well-designed product as well.  If it weren’t for the performance issues, I could easily see some combination of the two (with a probable nod towards Media Center) as my first choice for music playback.

The performance issues and inability to manage a rather dynamic library have led me to seek out other options.  As I said at the beginning of this post, Media Monkey has largely become my first choice as a music player, despite some definitely shortcomings on small-screen devices.  In the hopefully near future, I will share my in-depth discussion of that product in another post.

As I have mentioned in some of my previous posts, the large hard drive capacity on the v7110 was a big motivator for me when I choose that model. With a 160GB hard drive, I actually carry around my entire, rather extensive music collection on my eo. My music collection (mostly MP3s at 128 or 192 mbps) takes up nearly 85GB on my hard drive and represents around 1,500 different albums.

In this article, I’m going to share tips in a couple key areas for effectively managing a music library to make it work well with Origami Experience.

Music Tagging

Origami Experience is really a front-end to Windows Media Player 11 for media playback, using the media file’s tags as the main organizational structure. In order to effectively be able to find and select music with the software, it is important to make sure that the tags are generally accurate and complete.

The music library section of Origami Experience lets you select music by Album, Artist, Genre, Playlists, or from a full list of all tracks in your library. You can also designate tracks as “favorites” from within Origami Experience and an additional tab gives you access to all tracks so designated. Unfortunately, the current version doesn’t allow for broader hierarchical navigation than each individual selection navigating you to a list of tracks. For instance, if you go to the “Genre” tab and then select “Pop”, it will then list all tracks under that genre. There is no way to easily find all albums or artists that are under the “Pop” genre. As my music collection is dominated by types of music that tends to be played an album at a time (such as classical, film scores, and musical cast albums), I rarely use anything other than the “Album” tab when selecting music.

It is very important to be aware that album and artist tags generally work together in the Windows Media Player library, which means that multi-artist albums may not show up grouped together unless the tags have been set up correctly. The “Album Artist” tag is usually needed to force multi-artist albums to be grouped together properly. When the album artist is not set (or not set correctly), I’ve found two common behaviors. Most frequently, the album will simply show up multiple times in the list, with each separate “album” containing only the tracks with common artist tags. The other situation that I have seen is where it will correctly list only a single album, but the tracks will not play in the correct order. In these cases, it seems to play the tracks alphabetically by artist name instead of sorting them by track number. Either of these problems can usually be fixed by making sure that both the album name and album artist tags match exactly for all tracks.

Other than designation of “favorites” and adding new file directories to the library, Origami Experience does not have any built-in mechanisms for organization of music. Instead, it is necessary to go into Windows Media Player itself (or some other tag editor) to organize your tracks. The album view in Windows Media Player should directly mirror what you will see in Origami Experience, so it is pretty easy to get the tags in order there.

Album Art

Both the music selection interface and the “Now Playing” screens in Origami Experience are very visually-oriented with album art providing a key visual cue. Most newer CD ripping tools (and certainly most download services) will generally place album art into your tracks automatically, but if you have a lot of older or fairly obscure tracks, you probably are going to want to try and track down album art for them.

I tracked down and added album art to my tracks using a descriptively-named freeware tool called Album Cover Art Downloader. This tool will search several sources (including Amazon.com, Yahoo Images, and Walmart.com) and present you with likely matches for your albums. There is a fully-automatic mode that you can use as well, but it probably will generate a lot of mismatches unless your album collection is very mainstream with very clear tags. If the software’s search mechanism does not find an appropriate match, the tool also allows you to drag and drop images from your hard drive. Once you have selected the appropriate image, it will then apply it to the music using the most common methods for that audio format.

Even with a fairly non-mainstream collection, I was able to find a fairly large percentage of my album art using Album Cover Art Downloader’s built-in search mechanism. The rest of the album art took some searching to track down, but through effective use of Google, sites for various music labels, and a few specialty sites (including SoundtrackCollector.com, which is a great source of album art and other information on movie soundtracks), I was able to fill in my collection. Of course, a scanner and the original CD cover (if you have it) is another option, if you can’t find a digital image that is already available online.

Music Sources

As the music player for Origami Experience is really just a front-end for Windows Media Player, your digital music needs to be in a format compatible with that player in order to use it. Without any special plug-ins, that generally means MP3 or WMA files. Other formats might work if you install third-party plug-ins for WMP, but I haven’t tried that. My own collection is almost entirely MP3 files ripped from my own CD collection.

Many people now purchase and download music from various music services. Any music purchased from a service that is compatible with Microsoft’s “Plays for Sure” digital rights management (DRM) system should play under Origami Experience, aas long as the computer has been authorized on that service. This includes such prominent services as Napster, Yahoo Music, Musicmatch, Wal-Mart, and MTV’s URGE. In most cases, this does require that you download, install, and authorize the player offered by each service before you can play the music from that service. You might even need to play the track once in the service’s own player before WMP can find a license for it.

The largest and most successful digital music service, Apple’s iTunes Music Store, uses its own proprietary DRM system that is not compatible with Origami Experience. A few other stores, including Sony’s Connect and Real Network’s music store also use incompatible proprietary systems. Most services do allow you to burn audio CDs of purchased tracks, though, which can then be re-ripped in a non-protected form. You shouldn’t lose any significant sound quality in this process if you re-rip them in the lossless WMA format, although this will generate files that are quite large. Since the music was already compressed when it was sold to you, re-ripping into another compressed format (such as MP3 or non-lossless WMA) will further degrade the quality, although this could be pretty hard to notice unless you are connecting your UMPC to a really high-end audio system.

Until the music industry either gives up on DRM or decides to standardize on a single, interchangeable format, my advice is actually to stick with buying CDs whenever possible. The audio quality is still better than what you get from most download services and there generally aren’t compatibility issues. For those occasions when music you want is only available from a download service (or for music already purchased), your best results in Origami Experience will probably come from burning the tracks to CD and re-ripping them in an unprotected format.

For convenience, my wife and I rent a mailbox from a shipping store fairly close to my office. This allows us to receive packages without having to worry about one or the other of us being home when they are delivered. Since the FedEx tracking provided by TabletKiosk had shown the package as delivered, I headed over to the store during my lunch hour yesterday and picked it up.

The photos that were included in the post were all actually taken on the front seat of my car while still in the parking lot of the shipping store. I used the built-in camera on my Motorola v551 cell phone to take the photos. The camera on this phone generally isn’t all that great, but it does take photos that are acceptable for that kind of quick web posting, as long as the photos are being taken in fairly bright lighting. This is the main reason why I took the photos right away in the car.

Next, I drove to a McDonald’s near my office for lunch. I selected McDonald’s not for the food (who goes there for the food???), but for the fact that they offer a couple hours of wi-fi access for $2.95. After getting my burger and fries, I found a table and powered up the eo. I loaded up Firefox and entered my credit card information to purchase the block of time on the WayPoint wi-fi service offered at the restaurant.

I transferred the photos from the cell phone via a retractable USB cable that I keep in the carrying case with the eo. I could have also used Bluetooth for this, but since I had the cable and was in a location where I had plenty of room to connect the phone in this way, I took advantage of the somewhat faster USB 2.0 transfer speed.

I reviewed the photos on the eo using the standard Windows XP photo viewer application and quickly narrowed it down to the 5 photos that I had ended up posting. I simply deleted the rest of the photos (which didn’t look very good) and renamed the ones that I intended to use to something more descriptive than the time/date stamp filenames generated by the phone. Although I do have Adobe Photoshop Elements installed on the eo and have found it to be usable for light photo editing, these photos didn’t really need any touch-up. Since the file sizes were all fairly small, I decided it wasn’t even necessary to re-size the images, even though I would be displaying them on the post at only 50% of their normal 640×480 size.

I then used the standard Windows XP FTP tool to transfer the photos to the images directory on my website. This file transfer was the main reason that I went to a restaurant with a wi-fi hotspot instead of simply using the slower Cingular EDGE connectivity with my cell phone. Since it was still my lunch hour, I was on a bit of a tight timeline to get this project completed.

I then browsed to blogger.com to actually type in the post itself. Since I can still type on a keyboard faster than I can use any of the built-in input methods on the eo, I used my ThinkOutside folding Bluetooth keyboard to type in the post. With the eo propped up on its stylus and the keyboard sitting in front of it, the little workstation fit easily on the restaurant table. The post wasn’t very lengthy, so it didn’t take very long to type it in and publish it. The only real mistake that I made was that, in my haste, I didn’t think to add “href” tags to allow readers to click on the photos to see the full-sized images. This is a correction I went in and added this morning.

With that, I had completed the post. The whole process took less than an hour, including travel time and the time to pick up the package from the store.

One of the most appealing aspects of a UMPC is that that it is a fully-functional Windows XP (and eventually Vista) PC without the dependency on a tether to a larger desktop or notebook system. Palm or Windows Mobile PDAs typically require such a tether for software installation, data initialization, or other similar tasks, but I think the greater power of the UMPC led Microsoft to the mistaken impression that synchronization tools were not really a requirement.

In reality, though, I strongly suspect that the majority of UMPC owners are going to experience a need to keep a lot of data synchronized between home and/or work systems and the UMPC. I find myself regularly copying documents, application data and settings, music, photos, and video from my home or work PC in order to maximize the mobility of all my core information. Since a UMPC is a more full-featured computer, a peer-to-peer style of synchronization makes more sense than the master-slave type used with PDAs or other similar portable devices (such as music players), but it still is needed.

Out of the box, readily available methods for transferring data between my TabletKiosk eo and other systems include shared drives over the wi-fi connection or the file transfer services that are standard to Bluetooth. The Samsung Q1 does provide a couple other file transfer options via the built-in CompactFlash slot and their inclusion of a USB 2.0 file-transfer cable (and software). Either of those options can also be available on the eo with additional $20-$30 purchases. I already picked up an inexpensive USB CF reader for my eo at the local Staples store and have ordered a file transfer cable as well to simplify transfers with my work PC, which doesn’t have Bluetooth or wi-fi available.

What is missing is software that automates the synchronization of data between the UMPC and the other systems. Without some form of third-party software, you can only manually copy files from one system to the other. I think this was a major omission in the design of the standard set of tools supplied by Microsoft for inclusion in every certified UMPC. Ideally, what is needed is a mechanism where, once appropriate data pairings between the UMPC and another PC have been set up, the synchronization would happen invisibly in the background while the system is idle. There probably would be a need for some kind of a notification mechanism for conflict situations (such as data modified separately on multiple systems), but most of the time it should work in a “set it and forget about it” manner.

Considering the high mobility of a UMPC, one key issue that any synchronization mechanism needs to deal with is that not all remote locations will be available at all times. In my own case, I can only access my home system while actually connected to my home network and can only access my work system after running a VPN client. A lot of the currently available solutions, including Microsoft’s own Foldershare synchronization service, seem to be very focused on overcoming this issue by creating ever-present accessibility via the public internet. This may be through the copying of files to a remote server or though special clients that run on each system and maintain a connection to a central server.

I can see the merit in these types of solutions under some circumstances, but there also need to be options that take into account that security needs very often dictate that data not be accessible outside of the local network. Corporate users, in particular, really are not going to be comfortable with potentially sensitive and confidential data being stored on someone else’s server or otherwise being made accessible out of the direct control of the company’s employees. In fact, the company that I work for has issued some pretty specific policies banning the use of remote data accessibility tools on systems connected to the company network. A complete synchronization solution needs to be able to detect whether or not a remote resource is actually available at any given time and handle either situation appropriately.

For simple directory synchronization, so far I have been using Microsoft’s free SyncToy. It is a pretty basic tool; simply letting you set up directory pairings and manually run synchronizations in the foreground. It probably would be possible to automate it somewhat using Windows Scheduler, but even that is pretty tricky since it isn’t always easy to predict when my UMPC will actually be on, but not being used. It works ok, but the synchronization process can be pretty slow at times and it does require that I actually remember to run it, increasing the potential that I could end up with needed data not present or up-to-date on the UMPC when I need them. I’ve looked at a few other synchronization tools that do provide a bit more automation, but I haven’t yet really found one that impressed me much. I’m certainly open to any suggestions from readers as to ones I should try.

I think another big synchronization need is for better synchronization at the application data level instead of the file directory level. It isn’t all that unusual for applications to have data and settings spread around to multiple and/or esoteric locations, making it tough to figure out what to synchronize. There are also occasions where it could be strongly desirable to be able to pick and choose parts of data to synchronize instead of simply synchronizing everything. An obvious example is that many people may want to synchronize Outlook contacts and/or calendar data between computers, but not stored email messages. Another obvious example would be the wish to keep browser favorites/bookmarks synchronized while keeping saved passwords specific to each individual computer. I use a Firefox extension called Foxmarks to accomplish exactly this type of bookmark synchronization, although once again this is using a central server to store the data while I would really vastly prefer it to just synchronize directly between my own computers.

The best solution would be to include application synchronization wizards as a part of a synchronization solution. Once Microsoft adds synchronization to Vista and/or as a standard part of the UMPC software package (as they should), it would be wise to include wizards for key Microsoft applications such as Outlook, Money, Internet Explorer, etc. as well as publish a publicly accessible API to allow third party software vendors and the general public to create wizards for other applications.

While I do think that a solution closer to what I describe should be a standard feature on UMPCs, and probably ultimately a standard part of the OS, it is possible that a lot of what I am describing can already be found via currently-available software packages. If anyone out there has encountered synchronization tools that work well and might better fit the needs I have described, please post a comment pointing me in their direction. I’d love to test suggested alternatives and eventually post a follow-up to this article describing solutions that work better than what I have found so far.

One of the biggest problems plaguing most portable digital music players is the fact that the industry has yet to standardize the file formats or, particularly, digital rights management schemes being used. Music purchased from online stores generally will only work on certain brands of portable players. For example, without additional conversion (usually involving loss of quality) an iPod can only play music purchased from iTunes, which itself won’t generally play on other brands of players.

Out of pure business necessity, every format and DRM scheme is compatible with Windows XP. That makes a UMPC into a universal portable music player. All you have to do is download and install the software that is required for playing whatever music you want to play. It is a bit of an irritant having to install a bunch of different music players on the device in order to get the widest compatibility, but it is certainly preferable to not being able to play some types of music at all.

The first music player that I installed on my eo (other than Windows Media Player, which comes with it) was Apple’s iTunes. Its online store has the best selection and it also has an exceptionally good podcast manager. Most importantly, since I have a Creative Labs portable player instead of an iPod, music purchased from iTunes wasn’t previously available to me on the go.

I used Microsoft’s free SyncToy folder synchronization tool to set up a network synchronization pairing between the folder on my desktop PC with all of my existing downloaded music and a new \music\download folder on the eo. It then only took a few minutes to authorize my iTunes account on the eo and then begin to play back some previously downloaded albums that weren’t available to me on my non-iPod portable player.

For podcasts, I went into iTunes and set up subscriptions for all of the podcasts that I had previously been downloading to my Palm PDA using QuickNews. Admittedly, iTunes isn’t really any more automated than the PDA software, but it makes it vastly easier to find new podcasts and to manage the subscriptions. With a 100GB hard drive, I also have much more space for them.

Since I have also purchased music from Musicmatch, Napster, and Yahoo, and since all the music I have ripped from CDs is in the wma format, iTunes can’t play back everything that I have. In addition, I simply don’t much like the overall user interface for iTunes, which is way too focused on playlists for my needs. I typically listen to albums straight through and iTunes makes it way too hard to find and select music that way. Because of this, it isn’t my choice as my primary player.

On my desktop computer, I use Real Player as my primary music player and I have now downloaded it to my eo as well. I like the overall user interface of Real Player, as it provides a lot of flexibility for finding and selecting music to play. It also has the enormous advantage of being the only current XP-based music player that is able to organize and play music from nearly all the major online stores, including iTunes. It does require that the native software for those music stores be installed and authorized on the computer, but it currently is really my only choice for consolidating my whole library into a single player. Real Player has gotten a deserved reputation for loading a lot of intrusive promotional material onto your computer by default as well as for activating too many intrusive pop-up messages and other similar nonsense, but it isn’t too difficult to remove/disable all that and the end result is a rather nice piece of software.

Thanks to the built in wireless features, the eo also works well for playing Internet Radio. I particularly like the stations on Yahoo’s Launchcast service and installed their software for it. It works well. Although you need to make sure you have a strong signal and an unlimited data plan. I haven’t tried it yet, but the eo should be able to play XM (or Sirius) satellite radio via their online services as well.

For audio playback in general, I have found that the sound quality out of the headphone jack is quite good. I have been listening with a pretty decent pair of Sennheiser headphones and haven’t actually tried the included earbuds. The sound has been very clear with good bass and no noticeable noise. I have found that the sound levels are rather high, which means that I have had to keep it at pretty close to the bottom of the volume settings. It might be worthwhile to get an external volume control that connects between the headphone jack and the headphones to provide a bit more fine control.

One other weird problem that I encountered when playing music back was that periodically the sound would suddenly become garbled and stuttering. I suspect that something in the background is causing music players to lose focus and it doesn’t seem to be able to recover easily. In these cases, the problem could consistently be cleared simply by pausing and un-pausing the playback.

While a UMPC probably isn’t a great choice for music playback while jogging, exercising, or other activities where a smaller device is preferable, it definitely is an excellent choice for listening to music at work, on an airplane, during a commute, or many other places where you need portability but not pocketability. I see this as one of the key selling points for these devices. I already love this feature of my eo.