My Casio Cassiopeia E-125 Pocket-PC!
Tips and Tricks
BACK
These are some tips I've found on different places on the Internet that I've found very helpful and I wish to pass on :)
Media Player & MP3s on Compact Flash cards
When I first got my E-125 & 32MB CF card, I put some MP3s on it (by placing the CF card in it's PCMCIA sleeve and copying them from my laptop). But Media Player on my E-125 wouldn't find them!!! Well, I dug, and what you have to do is to create a directory called 'My Documents' on the CF card, and place the MP3s in that directory. Then it works great!!!
Screen Blanking in Media Player
I've tried several utilities such as ATBLANK & Screen Off, but neither works on the E-125. However, Media Player actually has this feature buried in it!!! In Media Player go to 'Tools' -> 'Options'. You can then map the 'Screen Toggle' function to one of the Casio's buttons! I love it!
Fixing sound degredation when multi-tasking with Windows Media Player
One thing I've noticed is that when I'm playing MP3's and doing GPS navigation at the same time, the sound quality isn't all that great as soon as I switch from Media Player to DeLorme Solus Pro (or any other program for that matter). However, someone's found a way to fix this!!! It requires a Windows CE Registry Editor, but it is DEFINATELY WORTH THE EFFORT (a whole 5 minutes :) ). I used StarTap. You can find the instructions for doing this on Dale Coffing's Pocket PC Passion site in his Media Player FAQ!
Windows WMA VS. MP3
On Dale Coffings Windows Media Player FAQ, I noticed that one person said that WMA files encoded at 64K are much smaller, and sounded comparable to, MP3s encoded at 128K. My personal experience, however, was much different. I took a set of my favorite 80s/90s MP3s and used WinAmp 2.7 to convert them to WMAs. They were certainly smaller (I was able to fit about 15 64K WMA files on my 32MB CF card, VS. 7 128K MP3s). But I had some problems with the sound encoding. Now, keep in mind that I'm VERY PICKY about music quality, so this may not apply to most people. That said, I had two major problems. The first was bass. It sounded to me like the WMA file simple had no deep, rich bass. I like bass... I like a lot of bass :). I want MORE bass, not less! So that really turned me off. The other problem I had was that I heard some very weird noises in the background. It almost sounded as if R2D2 was back there chirping away, and it WAS REALLY DISTRACTING. Now, again, take into account that I'm a very picky about audio quality (probably borderline anal)... but those two factors alone pushed me away from 64K WMA files. Now, 128K WMA files may take care of those two problems, but what would be the advantage to that? I've already got my 200 CD collection encoded to 128K MP3s, I'm not about to spend all that time RE-encoding or converting them!!! So, in the end I would suppose it all comes down to you. If you're not quality anal like I am, then 64K encoded WMA files may be great for you, especially if you're space limited. However, if you've got a nice sized CF card or lucky enough to have a microdrive, then stick with MP3s!!!