
Music Conduit 1.0.4 Beta
A working substitute for the Transfer to Device feature in Windows Media Player
Microsoft graced its costumers with a fine piece of code in Windows Media Player 7: The Transfer to Device feature. You could browse your music collection, select a few songs, select a folder within you Windows CE (Pocket PC, Palm-sized PC, Handheld PC or Smartphone) device and have those songs re-compressed into your tiny PDA storage space. This feature is one of the main reasons I used Windows Media Player to listen to my MP3 collection: I could clickdy-click and in half an hour I had a brand new selection inside my PDA ready for my next jogging session. But Microsoft has its own ideas on the obsolescence of technology: My good-as-new, Pocket-PC-2000-powered HP Jornada is no longer a supported device in Media Player 9. The reason is it has a serial connection, instead of USB or Bluetooth. There's an IrDA port on it too, but good luck trying to pay as little as a serial cable on a PC infrared port. So here I was, all dressed-up with no music to jog to. And the frigging Media Player 9 has no uninstall feature. So I built up some courage and made a dreaded System Restore. It took a lifetime and lost me everything I had installed after Media Player 9.
Months passed and I was the only Microsoft system using technophile that still ran Media Player 7.1. One night came a sneaky little Windows Update that "automatically detected critical Windows Media updates" and I foolishly accepted it. From that night on every damn time I used Windows Media Player, it warned me there were "Windows Media updates available". The first few times I clicked "Accept" on the dialog box just to see a Media Player 9 Series Installer show up. After nearly passing out a few dozen times from the fear of another damn System Restore, I stopped clicking "Accept". But the dialog boxes kept coming up. One night I told myself "You're a programmer, Eduardo, you must do something about it !"
So the next Friday ("only start personal projects on Friday nights so reality doesn't catch up with you until it's already done", that's my motto) I bought a few 2-litter bottles of Pepsi Twist Light and sat down in front of my PC. A few sleepless nights after that Music Conduit was born. It's far from perfect but does the job pretty damn well and, in my humble opinion, a lot better than Windows Media Player. It decodes your original MP3s using mpglib of Linux fame and uses LAME 3.93.1 to encode it back to real MP3s to your portable device, not that crappy Windows Media Audio. You can change compression settings on the fly to see how much space your selection takes up ("hmmm, if I reduce this bitrate a bit more I can cram my whole Metallica collection inside this 16MB Compact Flash Card") and how much time it will take to be packed and ready to roll. It takes a little longer than Media Player to copy each song because of the way it encodes them (to a temporary folder inside your PC, not directly to you device) but makes up in audio quality (I get really passable MP3s with only 48kbps, impossible to tell from the original on earbuds, FM-radio sounding on speakers, and using only 350kB per minute). Right before I started writing this page, I ran Media Player 7 for the last time. I clicked "Accept" and let Windows Media Player 9 install itself on my system. I no longer need it's supporting my PDA. I'm free. And I'm seriously thinking of "System Restoring" it from my computer and never having another look at Windows Media Player again.

MusicConduit104.exe
3.2 MB self-extracting ZIP archive.

MusicConduit104.exe (mirror)
3.2 MB self-extracting ZIP archive.
So here it is, free for your personal enjoyment. It is packed as a self-extracting zip file containing installation software. Running it unpacks all installation files to your hard drive and runs Setup.exe so you can change install defaults. After it is installed, go to it's program group and run Music Conduit. When run for the first time, Music Conduit takes some configuration decisions and adds them to your system registry. You can (and I recommend you do) later chance these settings clicking on the Settings menu on the top-right corner of Music Conduit. What brings us to the screenshots and tutorial session (one linux developer once wrote that screenshots are useless, but people like them anyway, so here they are):

Music Conduit's main page (version 1.0.3 was an internal version but the interface is unaltered).
As you run Music Conduit, it lists all MP3 and WAV files from your default media folder (If none is specified, it lists "C:\", no subfolders). From here you can take two steps: Connect you device to your PC or navigate to the folder containing your MP3s and select then. I'll assume the first, taking us to the following screenshot:

Waiting for ActiveSync to make up its mind on whether there is a Win CE device connected or not.
Clicking Connect leads to the syncing of Music Conduit and your portable device. Music Conduit lists every folder accessible to Media Player 4.0 for Windows CE (the version shipped with most Pocket PC 2000 devices). Be sure to connect your device physically before clicking Connect otherwise Music Conduit will be put on hold by ActiveSync until it determines why no devices can be found (if you've ever clicked "Get Connected..." on ActiveSync you can tell it takes a lifetime).

Not all of your folders are listed, because Media Player only sees inside \My Documents\ and \Storage Card\My Documents\
Select you destination folder. Due to lack of documentation, I haven't yet implemented a free-space-detection routine for the portable device. But you can manually see how much free storage memory is available on both internal and storage card memory by visiting Memory under Settings > System on your device. (If anyone knows how to use and implement CeRapiInvoke and GetDiskFreeSpaceEx on the CE API in Visual Basic please send me a note on emercer@terra.com.br and I'll release a patched version ASAP).

Song selection. You'll notice that once both connection and selection are done the "Encode" button is enabled.
Now you can proceed to selecting music for the transition. Double-clicking a song plays it on the Media Player under the path selection box. Checking it loads the song (if not already loaded) for length measurement purposes. (Microsoft Media Player ActiveX is used for this so the current playing is interrupted. I'm working on ways around that, preferably getting rid of anything Microsoft-related). Under the song selection box is the information of total music time and, below that, the estimatives for total file sizes and total transfer time (this number is based on a serial connection. The estimation can be way off the real numbers you get. After all files are encoded and transferred, Music Conduit gives you the exact offset between estimation and reality. I encourage you to send these numbers to me at emercer@terra.com.br together with system configuration: processor and memory of both your device and your PC and the connection type). When you're done, click the now enabled "Encode" button.

The first file is being encoded. Once LAME takes care of that,
the file is transferred to the device and the next one is encoded.
The encoding process is divided in two steps: the actual encoding and the transfer of the encoded file from the PC to your mobile device. During the encoding part, you'll see a progress indicator on the lower-left corner rise as the file is analyzed and encoded. It can miss the spot sometimes since LAME is such advanced a compressor that it becomes nearly unpredictable. But don't worry, it won't half-encode anything, it only stops the progress bar at the wrong spot. Also, the estimated transfer time changes into a timer, indicating how much of that has already elapsed. Then comes the transfer part. There are two distinct ways to transfer files via ActiveSync: synchronously and asynchronously. A synchronous transfer takes time, but allows you to stream small portions of a file as you create it. The asynchronous transfer requires you to buffer the entire file and then loads it entirely to the device at a single step. This was the method I chose because LAME encodes the entire file before I can send it and there is some speed improvement over the other method, but the drawback is there is no feedback until the file is completed. So the file transfer dialog doesn't have a progress bar. Instead, it looks like this:

This is all the company you get during stressful transfer times
Based on file size, Music Conduit attempts to predict how much time it'll take ActiveSync to acknowledge the transfer and then halts until it does. For long files it can be very distressing to stare at a frozen dialog box, but it takes no more than a couple of minutes each song and actually saves you time.
After all files are transfered comes a dialog to indicate that all files were transferred and the time it took to do so. Music Conduit re-syncs it's mobile device folder information to reflect the presence of your songs and refreshes the music selection box:

Voil� ! Your MP3 collection, to go.
Now let's discuss the settings. The settings window contains the same three settings on the lower-left corner of Music Conduit's window, the difference it that it sets the defaults you want to use and the lower-left ones are for those times you want to depart from those default settings. It also contains two path settings: Where to look for music files when Music Conduit starts and where to temporarily save your MP3 files as LAME encodes them (it doesn't have to be on a drive with lots of free space since each song takes only a few MBs. Depending on your settings, even less). It also contains version info, stuff that I'm legally advised to tell you. On to the settings:

Bitrate: Is the most important part of the encoding process. Tells LAME how much space it is allowed to reserve a given second of music. LAME can encode anything from 32kbps to 320kbps, in steps of eight. The "normal", P2P shared MP3s are in between 96kbps and 192kbps, most of them 128kbps. That allows what is called perceptual transparency, or a bandwidth of about 20kHz, or, lamens terms, CD quality. Under that comes the bandwidths from 16kHz to 11kHz that can be compared to FM radio. in 32kbps, you have the muffled sound of AM radio. The system's default is 48kbps, two steps above the 32kbps minimum, what allows you to compress half and hour of music to a little over 10MBs.
Quality: LAME allows for many levels of quality settings, but the time gained by reducing it below the third isn't worth the loss of perceptual quality. This setting determines how minutious is the analysis LAME makes on each song before encoding. This analysis allows LAME to concentrate on different frequencies every single frame of the music, giving a larger amount of data to lower frequencies during the drums and to the higher frequencies during guitar solos. The default is Good, and takes up to 25% of the music's length to encode on a gigahertz-plus processor.
Channels: There are many different channel settings, contrary to the usual stereo or mono standard. Stereo encodes left and right as independent data, but allows LAME to concentrate on the channel that has most information on each frame (the amount of concentration depends on the Quality setting). Both Joint-Stereo systems encode an average of both left and right channels in one band and, in the other band, the difference between both. Since most parts of a music have basically the same data on both channels, this allows for extra compression (since the Bitrate is fixed, the saved space amounts for greater quality). Forced Joint-Stereo forces LAME to encode in this fashion during the whole length of a song and can be useful if some device refuses to play Joint-Stereo compressed songs, which change dynamically between stereo and joint-stereo during song play (if some part of the music has too much difference between left and right, stereo can be more space-efficient). Dual Channels is a kind of Forced Stereo. It encodes left and right as completely independent channels. It's useful for files that contains different sources of data in each channel, like audio from SAP TV (original language dialog in one channel and dubbed dialog in the other) but allows for no extra compression (thus making the Quality setting useless). Mono is, of course, mono. It adds both channels and encodes as one. Not having to share space between two channels, mono MP3 has better quality, but no spatiality.
Open: The folder Music Conduit opens when started. Set it to your music collection (\My Documents\My Music or \My Shared Folder if you use KaZaA or wherever you keep your MP3s.)
Temp: Where to write the temporary files Music Conduit creates during encoding. Since each temp file is deleted right after transferred, no more than a couple MBs are needed at any given time, so unless needed you can keep it to the default (the folder where you originally installed Music Conduit).
Now for the legal stuff (this can also be found at COPYING.TXT and LICENSE.TXT)
LAME and mpglib are licensed under the LGPL (GNU Library General Public License). It states, in a nutshell, that you can use any software licensed under it as long as you give it's creator the due credit and, if you make modifications, contribute those back to the original creator so he can benefit from those as well. It also states that you should either distribute the source code of such software with your package, or at least link to the original software's page. It also prevents you from patenting the use of the original software on yours, thus making it no longer open. But since you've read all the way till here I guess you're probably in the mood for the small-print. So here it is (Can also be found as COPYING.TXT)
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You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA. Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail. You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the library, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names: Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the library `Frob' (a library for tweaking knobs) written by James Random Hacker. <signature of Ty Coon>, 1 April 1990 Ty Coon, President of Vice That's all there is to it! |
There is also the short LICENSE.TXT, which describes how to comply to the LGPL when creating new software based on code licensed under it:
Can I use LAME in my commercial program? Yes, you can, under the restrictions of the LGPL. The easiest way to do this is to: 1. Link to LAME as separate library (libmp3lame.a on unix or lame_enc.dll on windows) 2. Fully acknowledge that you are using LAME, and give a link to our web site, www.mp3dev.org 3. If you make modifications to LAME, you *must* release these these modifications back to the LAME project, under the LGPL. *** IMPORTANT NOTE *** The decoding functions provided in LAME use the mpglib decoding engine which is under the GPL. They may not be used by any program not released under the GPL unless you obtain such permission from the MPG123 project (www.mpg123.de). *** NOTE ADDED BY THE DEVELOPER OF MUSIC CONDUIT *** This information is no longer accurate. As of May 18th, 2001, the MPG123 is distributed under two different licenses. The mpglib, the part used in LAME, is now distributed under LGPL. The rest of it is still GPL, but is not used in LAME (nor in Music Conduit) |
And now, the links:
LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder, says it's name. But it is not only "an MP3 Encoder", it's the best non-ISO encoder. LAME is an educational tool to be used for learning about MP3 encoding. The goal of the LAME project is to use the open source model to improve the psycho acoustics, noise shaping and speed of MP3. It is developed by a pool of programmers that can be seen here.
mpglib is part of the MPG123 Project, a real time MPEG Audio Player for Layer 1,2 and Layer3 tested with Linux, FreeBSD, SunOS4.1.3, Solaris 2.5, HPUX 9.x and SGI Irix. MPG123 is only intended for non-commercial use and was created by Michael Hipp.
Music Conduit was written by Eduardo Mercer (me) on a weekend of post-teenage, caffeine-induced euphoria. It runs on any system that runs Visual Basic "compiled" software (VB doesn't really compile, what in my view is great since Microsoft could decide to launch a Linux Run-Time Environment or a Mac OS Run-Time Environment and all my software would run in these systems without forcing me to evolve my shitty C++ skills into something usable. Not that they would, since Microsoft has very different views on the existence of multiple OSes then most people). You can reach me here.