Palm and Treo Hacks

Listen to Music

Turn your Palm into a portable music player.

The first step in listening to music is to find some music to listen to. The major music players for Palm devices (AeroPlayer and Pocket Tunes) both play MP3s and Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) files. Ogg Vorbis is a nice format because it isn’t patent-encumbered.

Tip

If a music format is patent-encumbered, that means that it might infringe on someone else’s patented invention, which usually means that the number of players is limited. To write a player for a patent-encumbered format, the author needs to either take on a certain legal risk or spend the money to license the patent. You are more likely to be able to find players for formats that aren’t patent-encumbered, and the players are likely to be less expensive.

There are various sources for music:

MagnaTune

MagnaTune (http://www.magnatune.com) is an independent Internet music label. Their tag line is “We’re a record label, but we’re not evil.” They have previews of all of their music available for you to listen to. If you hear something you like, you can purchase and download it. Once you buy music there, you can download it as many times as you need to and in any format that you want. You can also burn a CD from the music you download.

Game sites

Many game publishers (e.g., Blizzard, http://www.blizzard.com) end up putting some or all of the music for their games up for free download. For example, there is music available from World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com) If ...