I picked up a new Palm Tungsten T3 last week, along with a 512MB SD card. I'm looking around for audio player software capable of playing back with decent sound quality. I will use my Sennheiser MX300 earbuds for listening.

First of all, this is not my primary music player, I have an iPod. I bought the SD card so I could throw a few CD's and listen anywhere, when I don't want to carry the iPod. I bought the Tungsten mainly for work, which means I will almost always have it with me. Not so for the iPod.

Playback of AAC/M4A would be perfect, since I already have all my CD's ripped using iTunes 4.2 @ 192kbps. Ogg Vorbis would be a second choice, though I'm a bit worried about power consumption. I know especially with some portable MP3 players (iRiver) Ogg Vorbis playback significantly eats into the battery life. The fallback is of course MP3, though that means a bit lower quality for given bitrate. Both Vorbis and MP3 would mean transcoding from FLAC, so AAC would be the best choice if possible.

I found one called MMPlayer which looks promising and plays back MP3 and Vorbis, but not AAC. I've installed it and it works, and it's cheap (15 usd). It has a skinnable interface, though that's not a requirement as long as the GUI is properly done.

Any other Palm Tungsten owners out there with player recommendations?

FWIW, the bundled RealOne player is pure crap, though the GUI is acceptable.

edit: spelling

"FWIW, the bundled RealOne player is pure crap..."

Could you elaborate on this a little. I am considering a Palm with RealOne for purchase.

To Palm OS there are two great audio players: Pocket Tunes and AeroPlayer, I simply can't decide. Both are mature, and provide a much better service than Real Player or any other (even MMPlayer I have found bloated).

AAC is not an option on palm, sorry. MMPlayer claims it will be supported, but who knows...

I have a T3 myself, and encode with Ogg Vorbis (aotuv) at q2, getting a nominal bitrate of 96kpbs. It sounds great for a portable and for the size, I can get a SD card full of music. Perhaps you will chose some larger bitrate, because of your big card. About battery life, I can't state on the different impact of Vorbis or MP3. Anyway, T3's battery sucks, and Vorbis will not certainly make it suck more than MP3. Besides, I presume that the overload caused by processing Vorbis affects more a "light" computer like an iRiver player than a "more complete" computer like a handheld.

According to Real's website the latest RealOne player for Palm supports AAC at least on Real's own container (you can convert your existing files using Dtdrive)

Well, I sure wouldn't have made my purchase decision based on the RealOne player. Pretty much any software made by Real has been pretty bad over the years, IMHO. I suppose the RealOne player does what is says, it plays MP3's. But no other formats are supported, and there is absolutely no EQ or sound processing available. Listen with cheap headphones and it's OK. Listen with some decent quality headphones and you will hear the sound quality output of RealOne is not up to par.

And no, I didn't go to Real's website to read about their newest player. As a software dev, I try to stay as far away from Real products as I can.

Edit: I really hate that I can't even remove RealOne from my T3. It's in ROM and can't be uninstalled.

Again, more Real bashing! They aren't /that/ bad! Yes RealOne player has its quirks, most of them can be addressed - and they have only ever had one serious privacy concern of which they apologize for and have discarded the data (RealJukebox 1.0 returned playback statistics accidentally iirc).

As for having the player built into ROM - yeah, thats a bit of a pain... perhaps the lack of EQ is to do with the power of the system and bearing in mind economy on batteries... good thing Palm don't lock you into running signed apps only (I hope). The Helix Community may be working on a Palm player with more features, its worth checking them out.

Ruairi

For a short time I believed I would listen to AAC encoded music on my Palm (even if changing containers), but then I saw that RealOne's last version is available only to US residents, after subscription to their online music shop. So AAC is out of question to Palm users on the rest of the world.