Busker MP3 Player, for Palm and Treo
Here are some tips to help you get the most out of Busker MP3.

Album Art: Getting Pictures into your MP3s
Putting Music on an SD card
Podcasting: The Busker Way

Album Art: Getting Pictures into your MP3s
 

One of Busker's coolest features is that it can show pictures when it plays back your MP3 files - just like the brand new iPod Photo. These pictures are called Album Art, because they are usually an image or scan of the the album cover for the track. Busker shows Album Art when its playing back your music. Album Art can be stored inside the MP3 tag, and there are many desktop tools which will put artwork inside an MP3 file for you - Apple's free iTunes is one example. To put album art into an MP3 track with iTunes, follow this simple process: 1) Drag your MP3s into the iTunes library 2) Make sure 'show artwork' is selected, its on iTunes Edit Menu 3) Use Google to find the artwork for the album, amazon.com is also a good source 4) Select the tracks in iTunes 5) Drag the album picture from your web browser to iTunes, dropping it in the artwork area Now you can copy the updated MP3 files from iTunes to your SD card, and Busker will show the art when it plays.

As an alternative to storing the art files inside the MP3 tags, simply put a jpg file in the folder on your SD card containing the MP3 tracks you are playing. Busker first looks for a file called 'folder.jpg' but will also find any file with a .jpg extension in the folder and use that. Busker is limited to one jpg or picture per folder.

Putting Music on an SD Card
Busker plays music from an SD, so you'll need to get your files from your PC onto a card to play them. There are several ways to do this - the easiest is to use a PC card reader, and drag your MP3 files directly to the card then put it in your PDA.

If you don't have a card reader, then the excellant Softick Card Export II application lets you mount your PDA on your desktop as a disk, and you can drag MP3 files directly to the SD card (and see below for how Card Export can be used really effectively for keeping up with podcasts).

Finally, Palm's QuickInstall tool will let you install MP3 files by HotSync, which is easy, but painfully slow.

Podcasting: The Busker Way
 

Podcasting is a new audio phenomenon which has sprung out of the blogging community. An ever-growing number of amateur broadcasters are creating their own radio-style broadcasts, on a regular or ad hoc basis. You can use tools like iPodder or Doppler to track what is going on and make sure you have the latest content.

From version 1.1 we have started to add some podcast friendly features to Busker. These include bookmarking where you are in a track, so you can break out of listening to a podcast and be able to come back to where you were, excluding podcasts from QuickMix and giving podcasts their own icon in the track listings. We'll be doing more in future versions, and are keen to have feedback and suggestions.

On a Windows PC, I have had good success in using a combination of Busker, Card Export II and Windows Media Player to automatically get the latest podcasts onto my Treo.
The bulk of the technique is described in this engadget article, other things to note are - use Card Export to map your PDA to a PC drive, and choose that drive as the mobile device, and make sure you turn off the "Convert files as required by this device" option, otherwise all your mp3s will be converted to wma before they're put on the SD card!

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