I know I've posted before about using my ipaq to control winamp as well as my desire to use it as a networked walkman. I finally found the software. It was a little expensive ($60), but like the empeg I've found it to be a very configurable, elegant piece of software (although the interface is a bit overwhelming at first). I purchased the MKII Net version (striking similarity to my favorite product).

With it I can stream music to my ipaq. With a little bit of settings tweaking I got a responsive, click & pop free stream that has excellent volume control (very finely graded) that is extremelyquick & responsive.

The most impressive thing is the cpu utilization. WMP routinely makes the ipaq unusable for anything while playing music, but iPlay uses only about 12% of the processor. I fell asleep last night listening to mp3's on my headphones on my ipaq. I woke up five hours later and the battery on the main unit & sleeve were still at 50% (screen blanked). I was really impressed. The Net version uses a small server app that uses only about 2MB of resources and not much CPU to serve files. If you use a mapped share you don't have to get the Net version, but it is slower to initally get the file listing s that way. The Net version also has a mode for controlling winamp that's quick & effective. The playlist generation features in this mode are a bit thin, but its worked very reliably all day now.

The instructions are a bit dense, but they are complete. A good reading of them explains every feature. there's no on-device help so most screens are confusing at first. It's not for folks who like AOL, but I think most of the board members here will appreciate its functionality.

It can use both 802.11 as well as Bluetooth to accomplish the network connection. I don't have any BT devices so I can't comment on that part. There are a few settings to tweak the volume ramping which seem to accomodate the quirkyness of Ipaq & PPC. Non Arm processor devices are out of luck. Ogg Vorbis support is a few bucks extra, as is 'support'. Support consists of getting to ask questions & get upgrades for 30 or 60 days, depending on which version you get (Net or not). Purchases are by Paypal only and it takes a day or two to complete the transaction. A fully functional version of the MKII Net version is available at http://40th.com/wce/iplay/ . The only thing is that it will only play the first 60 seconds of a song before skipping to the next one.

Anybody else using this? I'd like to know your thoughts.

-Zeke