Showing album covers is the only feature why I would prefer this player.
Could anybody with a C3000 check, how the asignment is realized?
It's explained in the (Japanese) FAQ page on Sharp's website...
Here's what I could gather after browsing the (excite) translation of the FAQ and trying on my Zaurus:
1) Picture assignment: First select the tune in either the library, file or playlist mode. Go to the "File" menu, "Info" submenu. This will open a dialog box with three tabs.
On the first tab ("File info") you have various informations about the tune (title, artist, album, play time, size, date, format).
On the second tab ("Play info") you have a few MusicPlayer-specific informations: how you rated this tune, how many times you already played it, the last play date, and you comments if any (*)
On the third tab ("Effect image") you can select a picture to be associated with this tune (tap on the "Reference" button), or remove it ("Remove" button). There is also a checkbox at the bottom, and the text associated with this setting isn't displayed properly in English (i.e. it's truncated and hard to guess). This lets you associate the currently selected image with all the tunes of the same artist/album/genre/folder, and create exceptions (I think, I haven't played with this much).
Basically, if you want to display the art cover for an album, select it (the picture must be 640x480 pixels in size at most, if you don't want to experience slowdowns when the Zaurus displays it) for any tune in this album, then check the bottom checkbox, select "Album" in the left popup list, and "All" in the right popup list.
Next, you'll also have to go to the "Options" menu, "Preferences" submenu, "Playing View" tab, and check the "effect on" checkbox in the bottom ("Display Settings") frame, otherwise the associated pictures still won't be displayed.
(*) to associate a comment with a tune, start to play it, then in the view mode, tap on the small pen icon just below the scroll bar showing the position in the tune.
2) Another useful feature is the new "Smart Play" mode (you can get it by either tapping multiple times on the "Mode" button just left of the "Stop" button, until it displays "Smart P", or by selecting the "Mode" menu and "Random2" submenu).
When you're in this mode, the playback will behave according to the settings you have set in the "Options" menu, "Random preferences..." submenu. Here's what you can find in this dialog box: (**)
+ The first radiobutton ("limit off") disables any time limit, so the playback will continue until you reach the end of the playlist, play the last tune in the current folder, etc.
+ The 2nd radiobutton ("e only", the english text is truncated) is the number of tunes to play before stopping.
+ The 3rd radiobutton ("nutes in", english text truncated again) is the playback duration (i.e. length of time you want to listen to your music before it stops).
+ The 4th radiobutton ("Hour" + "nutes" fields) lets you define a time at which the playback will stop (instead of a playback duration). The first field is for the hours, the second for the minutes.
+ The last three radiobuttons under the "last 1" label are used when you want to listen to a sequence of files until you've listened to a specific tune. The first one, "No specific" (truncated text again...) is probably used to disable that feature, while the other two radiobuttons labels vary depending on which tunes you recently played, and let you select those particular tunes. I've not (yet) played with those functions...
(**) obviously, the "Smart Play" mode must be activated if you want to stop the playback according to the above-mentioned settings. Also, you'll soon notice that you must select another mode (i.e. not Smart Play) if you want to be able to change the settings in the "Random preferences..." screen. If you're in "Smart Play" mode, then all the settings are grayed out and read-only.
Hope this helps!
Here's a sample screenshot to illustrate the image association :
[img]http://euroclie.free.fr/zaurus/sc_17.00.06_Wed_16._Mar_2005.png\" border=\"0\" class=\"linked-image\" /]
