is tkc player \'lame,\' or is it just me?

[havoc]

I downloaded TKC\'s player demo and tested it against my MP3s.  I was \"underwhelmed,\" but there\'s more to it than that.

Since my Zaurus was purchased to be more than an MP3 player, I decided it was worth the sound quality to be able to put more songs in less space.  I resampled the MP3s from 44 kHz to 22 kHz, and \"monofied\" them, which compressed about 535 MBs of songs into merely 93 MB, and the quality was still \"plenty good enough\" (throwing in a factor for the terrible road noise in my truck, and a price factor for SD and CF cards).

I\'ve had no problems playing these with madplay and Sharp\'s media player, but the TKC player demo just assumed that the songs were sampled at the standard default.  Needless to say, the quality was NOT going to work.

Since TKC makes you jump through hoops to talk to them on their site, I decided that I\'d just be a burden to this fine group. (!)

I like the interface and options in the TKC player, but I need to know if the most recent fully-functional version will correctly handle my resampled MP3s.

[in case anyone is interested in how I downsampled, here\'s a typical command:

lame -m m -a -b 32 mp3/various/in_the_name_of_love/beautiful_day.mp3 smusic/in_the_name_of_love/beautiful_day.mp3

I was actually quite pleased with the resulting tiny file size and good sound quality.]

[bluedevils]

Though I don\'t use tkcplayer, but if sharp\'s media player works fine then why would you want to pay for tkc\'s?

[padishah_emperor]

I am pleased with tkcplayer, I think the Sharp media player is ugly as hell, I use VBR mp3 plus I use OGG files quite happily.  I tried a demo before buying, it was rubbish, the actual player was better and didn\'t cost much at all.

I love tkcplayer and tkcvideo, now I am giving my 5500 to a friend, he is getting those apps too, theKompany are tyrants in that they WILL NOT allow me to transfer my already paid for apps to my forthcoming 860.

I will buy tkcPlayer again when my new machine arrives.

Although I can\'t comment on your circumstances, when I had issues with tkcVideo, they had it fixed within a week, but only because I sent some nasty emails..

If you have a \'resampled\' mp3 which is SMALL and you want to mail it to me to test on my 5500, let me know.

[RadioRental]

I dont resample but to answer bluedevil on why *I* bought the TKC software, I save internet radio streams to mp3 and copy them to CF daily.  So, I have these 120M mp3 files usually running over 2 hours depending on the stream bit rate. tkcPlayer was the only software I could find at the time that had a slider bar to allow me to skip to any point in the track easily.  I am not a huge fan of tkc, their software looks great and has great usability but I find its generally very sucky.  However that slider bar alone was enough for the asking price.

[havoc]

If you have a \'resampled\' mp3 which is SMALL and you want to mail it to me to test on my 5500, let me know.

I\'ve got one that\'s 572K.  is that small enough?  I can make it available to download off my web server for you, which will save the 40% e-mail bandwith inflation \"tax.\"  I\'ll shoot you a private message.

Thanks!

[padishah_emperor]

Sadly it doesn\'t work on tkcPlayer, it plays at double speed.

You could drop them a line, it should be catered for.

[havoc]

Here\'s a copy of what I sent to TKC:

I downloaded your tkc player demo.

I am playing MP3s on my Zaurus that had been down-sampled to 22KHz/mono (32 kbps) from standard 44 KHz/stereo (128 kbps) (default) MP3s.  Your demo player did not handle these files correctly.  I had a user who has registered your tkc player test one of the files for me, and he informed me that the registered version also failed to play the file correctly.

I would be interested in purchasing a license for your player because of the much better interface and options, but only if it can play these down-sampled files (or other files of varying sample rates).

Here is a link to one of the files that does not play correctly in your player:
http://www.bigpig.org/08_DC-10.mp3

I would also like to be able to play files like those from this site:
http://www.valley-cc.com/sermons.shtml    (11 KHz, 16 kbps)

I sincerely appreciate your effort and your time.  If this request is not possible, please respond, and let me know.

I\'ll keep you posted.

[havoc]

Several days later, I realized that I had not tested tkc player with ogg files.

I resampled one of my mp3s to the same spec (22khz/mono), reinstalled the tkc player demo, and it played just fine.

The disadvantage is that the ogg files are slightly larger than the mp3s of the same settings, but even at quality setting of 0 (10 being highest), the ogg files seem to be of higher qality than the mp3s at the default of 2 (0 being highest).  Go figure.