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The first challenge with the J&M and
BikeMP3
digital music players was to populate an SD memory card or
USB thumb drive with music. With a large selection of music
to choose from, I found it time consuming to (1) choose songs,
(2) organize them into each of the 10 CDs, (3) sort or randomize the
order they play in and (4) make sure there were only 99 or
fewer
songs per CD.
Earlier Players -- The JMDM-GL18
and BikeMP3 V1 and V2 plays the music in the order
the songs are loaded into the SD memory card, copying a
block of songs and dumping them on the SD memory card
doesn’t quite work the way you want. Microsoft has a
way of sorting by file title or date during the load.
New for 2011 -- The new
Bike MP3 V3 player released in February plays the song
tracks sorted alphabetically in up to 10 folders, depending
on what year GoldWing you have. The player also solves
many of the hardware problems experienced with earlier J&M
and BikeMP3 versions.
The challenge was to provide a software tool that played the
music in the specific order that the user wanted to listen
to the music, either sorted by title, artist, album, genre
or random play order. The software tool takes care of
the load order with the use of a "randomize" button for
scrambling the order of the songs.
This new software tool allows one to find all of the MP3/WMA
songs on their hard drive and provides an easy method for
organizing and loading the 10 virtual CDs. The tool limits
each CD to to a user-selected maximum number (99 for later
year GoldWings) songs and allows you to add, move and delete
songs according to what you want to listen to. The tool only
contains and manipulates a song catalog / list, so nothing
is ever actually touched on the source hard drive. Once the music lists have been
completed on any given CD, the user can choose to optionally
randomize, manually reorder or sort the song order again if needed. |
For the
final step, a simple drop-down menu is selected and
the songs are copied from your hard drive to the USB
Thumb drive or SD memory card. This is the only time the music files are actually accessed
by the tool. If any song file already exists on the
target memory chip it will not be re-copied over.
Afterward you can save the configuration so that the
process can be modified and repeated at a later
date. I find that having access to 990 songs is more
music than I can ever listen to in a single month of
riding. The rebuilding of the list is now a simple
task and allows me to want to change it more
frequently than if I had to use Excel or manually
build the list.
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On my
hard drive I have over 10,000 songs. The software
easily finds, organizes, randomizes and stores
exactly 99 songs on each of the 10 CD volumes. It
only takes about 30 seconds to create a new SD/Thumb
drive version from scratch.
We also tried the software tool on the 2gb microSD
memory chip used in my wife’s Samsung phone and
quickly added 300 songs to her phone. Since her
phone’s music player supports random play order of
music, we didn’t need to scramble the music prior to
loading songs into her phone. She's a happy camper
now.New Laptop Software
Version -- The software package comes
with an additional version sized for smaller laptop
screens sized for 800x600 resolution. When you
install the software, you will see two icons on the
screen for each version.
This product is not produced by J&M. The software is
of a generic MP3/WMA music player design with
multiple applications developed by an independent
software developer. |
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