Managing music for your Palm
To really get the most out of music on your Palm, you need to have good music management software on your desktop machine. A good music manager will automatically find and catalog your existing music. As well, it will allow you to set properties and search (or create playlists) using combinations of properties.
MediaMonkey is a decent music manager for Windows. It offers several choices for viewing your music collection. You can view songs by artist, title, genre or rating. It provides access to Palm devices with a plug-in which allows you to access removeable disks–such as a Palm device connected via “Data Import” or a memory card inserted into a card reader. You can easily move or copy music around, so you can set up a playlist, insert your memory card into the card reader, then transfer it over.
If you are using Linux, then you should look at amaroK, which is a KDE-based music manager. Similar to MediaMonkey, amaroK searches for existing music files. It allows you to organize playlists and to transfer files to a Palm device or memory card (through a card reader). amaroK seems to have slightly better support for getting album art and lyrics than MediaMonkey.
Both of these music programs support a wide range of music formats, including the ubiquitous MP3, but they also support OGG. These programs provide a lot of flexibility which can make dealing with a large music collection much easier. You can easily create smaller playlists (something that will fit on your Palm device), and then download that music to your PDA.