XPlayer Beta for your Blackberry UPDATE

Recently my friend with an iPhone showed me the Pandora app which streams internet radio via the iPhone. I was very impressed as I am an Internet Radio fan. BTW-Pandora can be found at Pandora.com. I will dig into Pandora some other time as it is well worth the effort.

I found a post on the crackberry.com forums that mentioned xplayer as a free internet radio, audio, and video player. I downloaded the beta at wap.shapeservices.com on my blackberry 8310 Curve.

The website specifically states "active users will be rewarded". Not sure what that will lead to but I am willing to give quality feedback if the product improves.

Info from the website:

Main Features

• All audio and video formats supported: mp3, m4a, avi, mp4, 3gp, wma, amr, mid, wav.
• Video full screen playback. Watch full screen video your BlackBerry screen.
• Playlist management: Create, Edit and Save your own playlists. Add a single file or a whole folder to a playlist.
• Advanced playlist sorting options: by title, by author or by path.
• Playlist Shuffle. xPlayer can play your songs in random order if you do not want to know what file is coming next.
• Use different themes to change the look of xPlayer.
• Background mode.
• Long battery life.

Compatible devices: Pearl 8100/8110/8120, Curve 8300/8310/8320/8330, 8800/8820/8830 (all 4.2 OS devices)

pics care of shapeservices.com

I look forward to the playlist mode if it truly can create and manage playlists. My BB Curve media player does not use playlists, which can be a bit annoying.

So far I have only played with the Internet Radio option. I listened to a few preloaded sites and they sound very nice on the BB. One note that I read on the crackberry forums that I needed to do myself. If you get choppy or delayed play back within a song, go to Settings, Radio, and set Data Connection Type from Use BIS Transport to Direct TCP. Seems to correct any choppyness (sp?). You can even check the box to use WiFi if you have a WiFi compatible BB. Very cool.

I first tried to create a radio station with my favorite site...Lucky 777. No luck. I think since Lucky 777 only uses the WMP codec, it would not load. It acted like xplayer wanted to play it, but hung. I then did some googling, crackberry forum searching, and found what I think is what xplayer needs to get a station to play. You need sites that stream mp3's. An example is SomaFM. I went to their site, found one of their mp3 feeds, and downloaded their .pls file. I opened the .pls file in Notepad.exe and swiped the webpage address and port, ie: http://steady.somafm.com:800X. When you type this in as your address for the station, click save, and then click on the new station, it plays like a champ.

I used 4 of their more softer stations to lull me through my quiet times. I have to be careful because this could chew up a lot of data, and I am not 100% sure I have unlimited data. I think I only have 5 gigs through AT&T. Must remember to use this only when I don't have my laptop up and running.

I need to do some more testing and research to get this address thing down. I am curious to see what filetypes this truly supports for internet radio streaming.

UPDATE: I loaded XPlayer this morning and looks like the Beta period is over. The app is now listed for $19.95. The site shows a new screenshot which looks very cool. I admit I was not terribly active as a Beta user and should have given them more helpful feedback. Oh well.

Mac Tip: Managing multiple libraries in iTunes 7

Here is a great link on macworld's site that discusses a somewhat unknown feature for iTunes 7. You can hold down the Option key on a Mac and tell iTunes what library to use.

http://www.macworld.com/article/53114/2006/09/lossless.html

The Quandaries of Backing Up a Music Library

Not too long ago in a galaxy not that far away, my hard drive crashed. ...and not just one hard drive...the hard drive that I just copies ALL of my mp3's over to while I was moving data back and forth. I have NEVER had a hard drive crash. My friends have had hard drives crash, but SpinRite was always there to save them (Read previous post on SpinRite or go to GRC.com/spinrite). Well, SpinRite ran for 3 months and finally the hard drive gave up the ghost. It had a handful of sectors that would not clean up.

I salvaged 1/3 of my mp3's from the hard drive before it went completely belly up, except all of my music was now in complete disarray. I copied the music 3 times and got a cadry of different songs each time. I also tried copying off of my ipod which blew up its dbase file. I only got a chunk of songs off of it before I had to reformat the ipod. Long story short, I have only a fraction of my colleciton that I built from the days of Hotline in the late 90's. I think Hotline was mostly a Mac user app but I made the most out of it before Napster and Limewire.

I have been ignoring the issue for months now and figured finally I would make the plunge to backup my entire CD collection and start fresh...mostly fresh. I came into the ownership of a 160 GB external HD that had old Windows files on it. I finally cleaned up this drive, reformatted it to work with my Mac (sans Fat32). I toiled with the idea of Lossless encoding for quite some time but now that I have the external HD, it was a non-issue. With a few days behind me, I am almost half way done with my CDs in lossless format. I plan on taking all of the lossless version and converting them to AAC or MP3 so I can import them to my ipod. I also need to find a way to back up the external HD. I am entertaining the thought of replacing my 250 GB external HD with a 1 T HD for my Time Machine backups. Really don't help if my house burns down. I have also entertained the idea of getting Jungle Disk and using Amazon's S3 service for my music and important stuff. I will let you know how it goes.

How to Remove and Clean your Blackberry Curve Trackball

My Blackberry Curve 8310's trackball got a bit sticky this week so I did some research and found a post on the Crackberry.com website about how to fix it. I tried it myself and was fortunately successful. You can click the title above to go to the forum post and/or check out my photos and steps.

PERFORM AT YOUR OWN RISK. Click on the images for a higher res image.

1) Grab something pointy, somewhat rigid, and PLASTIC. You don't want to booger up the plastic around the trackball encasement because if you have to take it back to your wireless provider when it breaks they will know what you have been doing. Try these plastic teeth flossers. They worked for me. The tips bent a bit but were rigid enough for me to work around the edge.


Lightly push the plastic utensil under the plastic cover, and lift slowly. It will pop, and then you can move around to the sides so each additional clasp will release. I lifted it too fast from the bottom and broke one of the four clasps. If the cover lifts a little, the clasp has released. Don't lift it too high until you think all four clasps have released.


Now the trackball housing is exposed. You just need to turn the phone over, tap it on the back, and voila...the housing falls out. Be careful because the parts are tiny!!



You can see where I broke the clasp. It is on the top left side. On the right is the housing with top cover, ball, rollers, and bottom cover. Here is a pic of the inside of the phone. May not hurt to clean off the pick-ups where each roller sits. Actually I really don't know if they are pick-ups, but just so happen to have one in each corner. I cleaned the gold contact (if that is what it is) as well with alcohol and a q-tip. This thing makes q-tips look big and clumsy.


Now you must carefully pry the bottom piece off the housing. Use a pin to lightly pry the metal clips back. The plastic bottom piece will lightly fall away (shown below on the right). Here is a pic to show the exposed housing with rollers and ball.


I removed all of the rollers and the ball and dropped them in alcohol. After sitting for a few minutes, I took a q-tip lightly soaked in alcohol and rubbed the grooves on the rollers clean. I also rubbed on the mini-magnets on the end of the rollers. Don't forget to clean the cup where the ball sits as well. I scrubbed on the ball for a bit but am not sure if it truly got cleaner at all.

I guess the trackball looks a bit more clear in this picture. Not sure why one of the rollers is scraped clean (far left). Maybe that was the culprit of my stickiness before I started?


See the dirty trackball cup on the right? The following picture shows it clean.


The next picture is a close up of the bottom piece. I showed this up close because I tried to attach it upside down and figured I could save you the confusion. Look at the previous picture and note the metal clips around the four sides. Two have 45 degree pieces and two have a whole cut out in them. The white plastic piece below attaches so that the metal spring/cup holds the ball tight.


After you get housing back together just lightly set it in the recess where it came from. Note: Look at the third photo in this post. Notice that one side of the housing has two small extensions and the other side doesn't. Then look at the fourth post. You can see the indentions where the small extensions sit. Don't force the housing back into the recess. It will fall into place when it is set in correctly. After that just lightly push the outer plastic piece into place and you are ready to go! Good luck.