Palm OS Audio Player Review: RealOne, AeroPlayer, Pocket Tunes Deluxe
posted Dec. 2003 by Tanker Bob

My first MP3 player was my Sony T665C. I liked that capability enough to want MP3 capability in its replacement. Although the Palm Tungsten series has had their audio system problems, Palm seems to have overcome them nicely with the T3. The delay in Real’s release of the RealOne Player for the earlier Tungstens opened up a market opportunity to third-party apps. Two apps in particular answered that call, and I’ll look at both of them in this review.

Back Stage

I conducted this review using a Palm Tungsten T3 with Sony ear buds. I ripped the music from CDs using dBPowerAmp Music Converter using their Lame MP3 and Ogg Vorbis Codecs. I picked three music pieces for specific reasons. I used Los Pecces en el Rio as performed by Chip Davis’ Mannheim Steamroller on their Christmas in the Aire CD. Davis has produced work legendary for its extremely high audio quality. His music possesses great realism and outstanding dynamic range, which challenges the best players and equalizers. Next, Santana’s Europa off the Best of Santana, Volume 2 CD provided some excellent tonality at both ends of the audio frequency spectrum. I also used Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird off of their Lynyrd Skynyrd CD, mainly because I like it so much, but also because it has vocals and a frequency content/distribution typical of good Rock & Roll. I ripped them all at 128kbps in both formats, although I used variable encoding for Ogg Vorbis to keep the file sizes down. However, I also compared the 128kbps encoding to 96 kbps for the MP3s, partly to evaluate the quality of the equalizers. Each player was evaluated with the exact same music files back-to-back for the greatest fidelity of comparison.

The user can transfer music files to the card any number of ways. I transferred the music files, like almost everything else I transfer to my T3, using Card Export 1.11 by Softick. It simply makes your card another drive on your PC, enabling you to copy/move stuff using your favorite desktop file manager. If you have a card reader, that would be even faster. Be forewarned: You could reach retirement age by the time Hotsync transfers large music files to your PDA’s card.

The most popular third-party players in the Palm OS world seem to be AeroPlayer and Pocket Tunes. Since RealOne Player comes with the T3, I used it as a baseline comparison. With apologies to my Sony friends, I no longer have my T665C and Sony’s AudioPlayer only works on Sony devices. I’ll cover RealPlayer first since it provided the baseline.

RealOne Player 1.10 by RealNetworks

NEXT -> AeroPlayer