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GSPlayer for Casio BE-300

GSPlayer is an amazing, free music player. It plays MP3 (all bitrates), OggVorbis and WAV files. It has a graphic equalizer with preamp, bass boost and surrond sound. It has power saving auto-screen-off and allows functions to be mapped to the BE-300's hardware buttons. It displays the files ID3 tags and has graphical VU meters. It is also skinable, allowing you to customize the look-and-feel to your own tastes, which is the focus of this page.

The program is frequently updated, so it is best to check the author's site to download the lastest version. The website is in Japanese, but just scroll down until you see "Download (English Version)". The zip file includes versions for several different handhelds (you want the MIPS version for the BE-300) as well a Win95 version to run on your PC.

Roll Your Own Skins

A skin consists of five graphic files in BMP format and one text file with a GPS extension. First I'll explain the function of each line of the GPS file. The part between {curly brackets} is my explanation, not part of the file.

[GSPlayer Skin] {this line always the same}
Version=1 {this one too}
Background=back.bmp {the background graphic, must be 240 X 80}
Number=number.bmp {graphics for digits 0 to 9}
Button=button.bmp {graphics for the buttons (play, rew, ff, etc)}
Status=status.bmp {graphics for the status icons}
PlayOption=playopt.bmp {graphics for the play option icons}
Disp=0 {0 for transperency behind the text, 1 for solid background}
DispColor=0,0,64 {display color in RGB format}
PeekColorL=0,192,0 {left peek meter color in RGB format}
PeekColorR=192,0,0 {right peek meter color in RGB format}
InfoColor=166, 202, 244 {information color in RGB format}
TitleColor=166, 202, 244 {title color in RGB format}
SeekColor=255, 0, 0 {seek bar color in RGB format}

If you're not familiar with the RGB format, each number from (0 minimum, 255 maximum) represents the amont of red, green and blue respectively, to mix together to get a specific colour. There's lots of online colour pickers like this one to help you figure out the numbers for the color you want.

For your first skin, your best bet is to just take an existing skin and put in a new background. Find a picture you want for the background and crop or resize it to 240 X 80 and save as a BMP file. Then edit the thrid line of the GPS file to reference your background file and save the GPS file as yourskin.gps. That's it, you're done!

Once you see what your new skin looks like (the Win95 version of GSPlayer is great for that), you may want to change the colours of some items to make them more visible against your background.

Now you're ready for some more advanced skining techniques. Load up one of the other BMP files (lets start with button.bmp in you graphic editing program. You'll see icons for the various buttons against a pink background. Don't mess with the background colour, it becomes transparent when loaded into the skin. However you can change the icons to whatever you want. The easiest change is to just change the colour to better match your background, but you can completely change the incons if you want (but you can't change the size of the file).

Some Sample Skins

Here are some same skins to get you started. Dark Angel is an update of the first skin I ever created. It now has four different Dark Angel themed skins. I got the background graphics from a PPC Dark Angel today theme and modified them to work on GSPlayer.

Download DarkAngel.zip

These GSPlayer skins are pretty plain, I basically made them just to show some new fonts I made for the track and time numbers. Basically I was bored with the old seven-segment LED style numbers in the default skins, so I made up some new ones.

The top one is "DotMatrix" is my attempt at reproducing the look of the newer style LCD displays. It works best against very light backgrounds. The bottom one is "Times" is my attempt at a Times-New-Roman style font. This one is 'heavyer' and will work with a larger variety of backgrounds. Feel free to use the "font" files (numdot.bmp and numtimes.bmp) in your own skins if you like.

Download NewFonts.zip

GSPlayer Tips

How to select a whole directory of MP3 for player?

On the GSPlayer menu underneth "Add File..." you will see an option called "Find File...". The name of this option is confusing, but this option is what you want. It really means "Add Directory". Click it and it shows you a tree view of your directories. When you select one it adds all the files in that directory to the current playlist. If you are used to the Casio MP3 player where all (and only) the files in \Storage Card\My Documents\Music get added to the playlist, you'll find this very similar.

Will GSPlayer damage my BE-300?

There have been some stories of BE-300s having their flash Nand-Disk corrupted shortly after installing GSPlayer. Some individuals with a great deal of visiblity and influence in the BE-300 community have since "black-listed" the program. I have examined the source-code personally and found nothing that would cause problems. I (and many others) use it nearly every day and have never experienced any problems. The fact is, the BE-300 is an extremely low-cost PDA with a unique internal flash disk arangment that no other PDA uses (likely with good reason). Some BE-300s have had nand-disk corruption after running nothing but the original applications supplied by Casio. I believe the likelyhood of GSPlayer being the cause of any hardware problems is extremely low.