Hobbyist Player

The Hobbyist Player is built into Butler, Phone Technician, Initiate and Mother. You can select it through the 'Mp3 Player' menu, or through the helpers preference in Initiate.

The Hobbyist Player will play mp3s for you on the Treo650 and onwards, the Centro, the Life Drive, The Tungsten T5 and E2 and the Zire 72.

It uses built in features of these devices - so it is limited, but it does mean you don't have to buy a separate mp3 player for basic mp3 play.

To use it, simply select the 'Hobbyist MP3 Player' from the 'MP3 Player' menu in any of my apps (from the helper menu in Initiate).

It is a basic player, it's intended to give basic mp3 play for alarms and may struggle with some file encoding. A 'Proper' mp3 player will give you a much more reliable player.

Playing MP3s from RAM

The Hobbyist MP3 Player, like Pocket Tunes, allows you to play mp3s from RAM. Obviously you won't get many into RAM (they're large), but this can be useful if you want to be sure an mp3 will play even if your sd card is accidentally ejected.

Copying MP3s over is tricky. They have to be copied in the same format that is used for Pocket Tunes.

To convert files to .pdb format, you have to use PAR

you then use this command to generate the .pdb file

par c -a "stream" song.pdb SongName.mp3 strm TNpt c:\songs\song.mp3

where song.pdb will be the name of your new database, c:\songs\song.mp3 is the location of the mp3 file

Please note I cannot provide support on this! ask at the forum if you need help

Once you have copied the mp3 over, select 'Internal' in the 'Memory' drop down when you select a song and you will see all correctly formatted mp3s.

Playing MP3s from RAM - Plan B

If you're using pocket tunes, you can just copy your mp3 to the hidden NVFS drive. The easiest way to do this would be to copy it from another sd card to the hidden drive using Filez. You will have to select the 'show hidden volumes' option in Filez.

Pocket Tunes recommend this over copying to RAM if you have an NVFS device. Otherwise, you can get skipping problems as the system copies data in and out of the cache.

Playing MP3s from RAM - Plan C

The other method to play mp3s from RAM is to simulate an SD card. To do that, you'll need an application like Softick RAM which will simulate an sd card in your main memory. To get MP3s on to the simulated SD card, you then need an app like Card Export 2 which allows you to connect your treo or centro via the hotsync cable to have an sd card appear as a usb drive on your pc. Once youve done that, you can just drag your mp3 to the simulated sd card.

The advantage of this method is that it will work with any mp3 player. The disadvantage is that you have to buy and use more software.