Over the weekend I helped out at a wedding by being the "official" DJ. Basically this meant that I have a fairly large music selection, and somewhere along the way someone believed I had some spare time, so the task fell to me.

Deciding to use the UMPC
The first thing I had to do was decide what to play music from. So why pick the UMPC? Well, we were moving a stereo to play music, so portability was key. The wedding was outside, which meant trucking a desktop wasn’t really practical. I could use an MP3 player, however I really wanted the option to change the playlist during the event (I’ve done this once before, and found a number of people who come up to you and ask “Can you please play…” and “Do you have any music by…”). So, the next obvious question – why not a laptop? Simply put – not enough room. The area to put the stereo was limited, and putting a hot computer that covers a stereo (precariously) on top wouldn’t work. Not to mention ease of use – it’s easier for me to pick up the computer and touch the screen to play music than it is to fumble with a laptop. Not to mention when using a laptop outdoors it becomes difficult to see the screen and nearly impossible to find a mouse cursor. The problems solves itself with touch – no need to locate a cursor (this to me was the killer difference). 

Copying media to my UMPC
With the UMPC, I now began to realize my second problem. I have a single computer that stores all my music. It’s great for syncing my MP3 player and even playing music over the network, but I need an offline scenario for the actual wedding. Not only that, the UMPC doesn’t have enough space to fit all my music (currently stored in WMA lossless). So, I needed a way to copy my music and encode it to fit on the smaller hard disk. One advantage I have – since this machine is also a test platform during the week, I didn’t need the media I have on it and I also wasn’t going to be reliably able to maintain the media on it after the weekend (you never know when you need to change your media to test something new).
My solution was to take what I feel is one of the more underutilized of Microsoft downloads – Windows Media Encoder 9 (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx). It is simple to install, will encode/decode, and best of all, it is free. Once installed, and with quick consultation of the script documentation, I could easily copy and encode my media to my UMPC using the following command:

cscript wmcmd.vbs -input <source> -output <destination> -profile a128

The nice part is <source> and <destination> can be directories – so I pointed the source to the root folder of all my music on my server and the destination to the root folder of where I wanted my music on my UMPC. The most important piece of this really is “a128”, which is the encoder’s default 128 bit audio profile. If you are strapped for more hard disk space, there are other default profiles or you can always create a custom profile. Once the command was started (from my main server, since it could decode/encode slightly quicker) I made sure to go to the “Power Options” control panel and change my power plan from “Balanced” to “High Performance”, which I had previously set up on both of these machines not to sleep while plugged in (this way the machines won’t try to power down).

Another key point here - Windows Media Encoder actually removes metadata as it encodes. This was kind of a pain for me, since searching in WMP was limited without this. I went back and wrote a quick app that uses the WMP metadata - I'll post more info on that when I blog my next installment.

Now, all I had to do was wait for the copying…

Ross