Media Boss
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005
Media Boss is a softwear synching tool for the PSP that connects it to a windows computer. As you would expect from the people at Mediafour, who brought us MacDrive and XPlay, this is a good solid application with some nice features, but sadly they have already been out gunned by some other players in the market, namely PSPWare from NullRiver.
I dont know about you, but I really dont want to be managing playlists in multiple applications and then trying to somehow get the whole thing synced up. I have an iPod, so I use iTunes, although I did try some alternatives before I settled. The first thing I felt was missing from Media Boss was the ability to pull playlist information from another application or better yet all of the big four media players - iTunes, WMP10, Real and WinAmp. On top of which it is missing the ability to create its own playlists. Since I have over 4,000 tracks on my computer to choose from, picking from an endlessly scrolling list is painful.
Moving on to the video area, again the endless list of video files to choose from is not the best user experience particularly since the app doesnt give the option to view the files internal "title" tag. Since PSP's want to use a clunky file name structure it makes it a little hard to remember which is which. I did not try the video conversion tool as I have tried a few others and that all ended in tears, I will stick to PSP Video 9 thanks (even if its documentation and online support is unhelpfully geeky).
The Photos area is again fine, but again the endless list of files or even thumbnails is problematic. It would seem to make sense to either refine this a bit and/or allow it to hook up to photo managers, like Adobe's Photoshop Elements (as iTunes does). From all of this it would appear that the application was designed with a small number of files on the master computer in mind. Given that most people (me included) are not good at keeping things organised, and most of them have something (like a media player) doing some of the work already it would make sense to me to leverage that and not try and recreate it.
I will admit it, what I really want is a single sync app that will let me coordinate all of my tools and toys (eg phone, ipod, pocket pc, online calendar/address book etc and now my PSP). Surely there is a market for someone to build a basic app that allows plug ins for other systems to be developed.
On the positive side of Media Boss, the Games backup freature is a good idea and well implimented. Podcasts are also a good feature (although why not just use itunes or ipodder). The skin for the app is good looking. The program is stable and works well but all up its not that much smarter than the new Windows Sync tool. If you have a small number of files you want to manage, this is a good tool but as you start to build files I think it rapidly becomes quite limited.
