This is a piece of software I stumbled upon while I was looking for things to do with Windows Media Player. I was looking into stuff about Windows Pocket PC which had its own version of Windows Media Player and came across this fantastic website. I’m not sure why it’s still hosted but it’s a lovely time capsule, something you would be more used to seeing on the Wayback Machine, but it’s nice to see a website preserved in its original form.

So that drew me in and I went about messing around with the software which they had free to download along with some plugins that I couldn’t quite get to work. But I came across this Reddit post, and also got a copy of the original Microsoft software from the internet archive.

It ran straight away using wine, a little fiddly to install, putting the setup exe in the SD folder of the emulator and just extracting it like a ZIP you can go into the pocket PC file explorer and click on the CAB files and it should just work. I read the manual provided and clicked around a bit, and then read the manual online and managed to put together a couple of bars. I play guitar but I’ve never done any digital audio stuff but it was pretty easy to do a little something and you can listen to it at the bottom of the page.

It was a fun way to spend a couple hours tinkering with and I’ll definitely be looking into more pocket PC and Windows mobile stuff. I really enjoy this kind of early portable software, I could definitely see myself getting one of these old pocket PC devices and messing with it, and it’s something I would have wanted if I was around at the time.

This has also made me want to look into more old tracking and sequencing software so that’s another thing I’m going to put on my list. I’ll put the few bits that are hosted on the website up on the internet archive here just to be safe. And I’ll put a couple of pictures in the gallery.