Music Player (Remix) Offers 25 Key Upgrades
PreCentral member DanPLC has hit gold with his Music Player (Remix). Remix is one of the Favorite Homebrew Apps and the most popular with over 200,000 downloads. Remix patches dozens of missing features into the Palm Pre webOS Music Player including a slider, elapsed time, font and background colors, wallpaper, bookmarks, lyrics, resume play, and on-the-fly-playlists. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Music Player (Remix) is that Dan has been working alone, part-time, for only two months.
Getting Started: Homebrew Apps, Patches, and Themes will show you how to install Remix and other Homebrew Applicaitons in a matter of minutes.
The Palm Pre has a list of great features. Unfortunately few of them are in the Music Player. In 2003, the Palm Treo 600 came bundled with Pocket Tunes 2.1. pTunes featured on the fly playlists, "skins," a "progress bar," bookmarks, and could even resume playing a long rock track where you left off. Sadly the Pre has not been able to meet Palm's own 2003 standards...
...until now!
Now Playing
The heart of any music player is the Now Playing screen. Music Player (Remix) updates the Pre's basic Music Player with a host of great features including bookmarks, lyrics, "Flylists,", and more.
Elapsed Time - See the elapsed and remaining time in the track.
Pause - You can also tap any title bar to pause or play.
Artist Playlist - Flick up or down on the album art to bring up your list of the artist's songs.
Flylists
Flylists are on-the-fly-playlists that you make on your Pre. From the Now Playing screen or any song list screen you can tap the Flylist button to add a song to a Flylist. You can make a Flylist anytime!
Notice the space wallpaper in this example!
Play a Flylist - Tap "Flylist" from the main menu and chose your Flylist.
Bookmarks
Bookmarks save your place so that you can resume playing at same spot. Bookmarks are especially important when listening to long tracks, podcasts, books, or other long files.
Bookmark Menu - Lets you Save, View and Delete Bookmarks!
Lyrics
Ever wonder what the words really are? Do you like to sing along? Then you will love the new Lyrics feature. Palm blocks access to the lyrics stored in your mp3 files so Remix looks up your song in the massive LyricWiki database!
Notice the dark sky background.
Lyrics - Tap Lyrics to search nearly a million songs lyrics at LyricWiki.org!
Stay Tuned!
There are just too many features in Music Player (Remix) to fit into one article and Dan just keeps on adding more. Stay tuned for the second part of this review with details on new options, playlist features, the Alphabet Selector, fonts, background colors, wallpapers, and the new landscape mode.
Craig Lincoln, aka Milominderbinder, is a moderator on the PreCentral forums and the developer of the Palm Pre Tips and Tricks. Craig's recent articles include Music Player (Remix), There's a Patch for That (Part 1), Part 2, and Part 3, and Getting Started: Homebrew Apps, Patches, and Themes.
PS If you need help, please post your request in the forums such as webOS Quick Install, Preware, or Patches
