I was getting a bit tired of the same old playlist on my PocketPC, so I took over 400 of my favourite MP3s, transcoded them to ~96kbps Ogg Vorbis format, and wrote a script to randomly pick out around 256 megs worth of them each time it was run, to build new playlists that would fit in the memory card. The hardest part of all that was not the transcoding, or writing the script; it was just getting the damn files transferred to the PocketPC.
About the only way to transfer files to it is to open it up under Explorer, and drag and drop files into the folder you want, and the ActiveSync program takes care of copying them over. However, attempting to do so would invariably halt and cause the USB connection to break after three or four files were copied. I’d have to resync, delete the partially copied file, and restart the copy where it left off. That would be merely annoying except that after a while it wouldn’t just break the connection, but it would also corrupt the memory card.
Now I had to reformat the memory card, but guess what, Windows CE doesn’t include any way to format cards. I had to go looking for utilities on the net, and most of the ones I ran across were commercial bundles of utilities, and I wasn’t about to shell out money just to format this stupid card. I finally found a free set of tools to do the formatting, and could use the card again.
I also finally found out that other people were having the same problem, and that there was a patch available for ActiveSync that fixes problems with large file transfers, and applied it. Now the files are transferring properly and there haven’t been any breaks or corruption yet, but it’s going very slowly at around 100K/s. Even with an old USB 1.0 connection it should be ten times faster…
Though in the end it’s now working, it’s frustrating that it had to be so much trouble in the first place. Devices like PDAs are supposed to just work right out of the box, but they couldn’t even get something as basic as transferring files working properly…