Let’s Make CorePlayer the "Best-Ever" Player!

We all know, Apple iPod undeniably success is due to iTunes integration, not only on the music/video store but also on the RSS/Podcast front, despite the fact that RSS/Podcasting existed long before iTunes embraces this technology. And until today, Microsoft has sorely failed on both mobile device (including the upcoming Zune) as well as the desktop side on the overgrowing popularity of Podcasting.

Robert Scoble, the famous Microsoft evangelist, when he was working at Microsoft, offered his take on Windows Media Player 11 regarding the lack of Podcast capability

“I think that not having Podcasting features will slow down Windows Media 11’s growth. Translation, I agree that it sucks that WM11 doesn’t have Podcasting features yet…. The Podcasting space is white hot and only going to get hotter and video blogging is coming onto the scene like a train of coal rolling into Livingston Montana.

Anyone miss how big a deal Rocketboom has become in just a year? Lesson for product planners in the tech industry: if you aren’t supporting the latest stuff you’ll be derided and left behind. If it takes 30 months to add a cool feature into your product you’re too slow, not agile enough, and will see slow growth….”

On Windows Mobile side, TCPMP has been the only player that can support audio, video in several formats (of course, until now, you have to scout the web to find some necessary codec plug-ins).

Despite its capability, TCPMP itself, could not provide the Podcast listening/viewing experience as iPod can do. Luckily, with my friend Vicott (Mobile-sg.com) talent, we put some thoughts together into his PlayListmgr utility to make the combo TCPMP + PlayListmgr , the most killer app on my mobile device. Read more here!.

My Audio/Audio Podcasts are aggregated on my PC using Juice. The free utility MobSync syncs to my Axim storage card. The results are shown in the picture on the right!. All my Podcasts are ended up on the file structure as shown on the picture on the right.

Every morning, I just launch PlayListmgr, click on “Podcast”, and “play all”. A playlist called Podcast.asx is automatically created with all the contents found in My Podcasts directory. The contents are sorted in the descending order (newest on top). Then PlayListmgr will launch the app the has .asx extension associated and shuts down itself. The player of choice is TCPMP (what else?). During the day, I just launch TCPMP again and it resumes where it left off on the playlist. You can view the video demo below 

 

I was critical with the version 1.0 of CorePlayer since it does not work with my above routine. CorePlayer does not work with the .asx playlist …until the full streaming suite is added with the ASF parser in V1.2 or perhaps sooner.

My point here is that CorePlayer should look in to this, and perhaps create a Podcast button, which accomplishes what the combo PlayListmgr and TCPMP could do. I am certain that CorePlayer can really take the iTunes position on the mobile device 

Unfortunately, instead of adding this capability, which guarantees 100% success, CorePlayer has decided to embark on the Social Networking, file sharing, tagging, etc… 

Steve Job recently mocked the Zune file sharing thing: “I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left!”…   Personally, I don’t think the social networking file sharing aspect, etc..matters much to me..compared to the RSS/Podcast/Vidcast feature. But, again, it is just 1 man opinion.

The picture below would be the perfect CorePlayer!

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