Pocket Play

I was looking for a free MP3 player for the Pocket PC that supported the Fast-Forward function. The built-in Windows Media Player does not support this, and neither does the excellent (and free) PocketMusic. FF is a must, because I like to listen to MP3s of radio broadcasts on the drive to and from work and I need to FF past the commercials!

So after posting the PocketPC Thoughts forums, I was led to two great programs.

The first is GSPlayer. It supports the FF and Rewind function, and you can bind them to your PPC buttons. Makes your PPC just like a portable MP3 player. The downside is that the site is in Japanese. However the program is easy to understand, and supports skins. Three skins are listed (screenshots) and lower down on the page you can download them (compressed .lz files) and decompress them to transfer to your PPC. I suppose you could make your own, but these are fine.

The other, and the one I am using, is called WinAmPaq. It too appears to be a Japanese project, but there are support pages in Engrish, which is better than none. As you can see below, it also supports WinAmp 2.x skins, which is great because I have tons of them.

Speaking of WinAmp, they have updated the 2.x version to 2.81. Ok this is not really news, but I had missed this update. I still think 2x is better than WinAmp 3.