If you are getting an error that states that the Music Assistant from Palm designed for the Palm Pre is ‘Unable to find a compatible desktop music application’ then you likely do not have itunes installed on your machine.

The Palm Pre Music assistant does not work with Windows Media Player. 

That said, if you are an itunes lover, you should be happy because Palm found a great way to get access to itunes and you will have a lot of functionality syncing up your itunes collection to your Pre.

Problem Solution

Simply download itunes from Apple (free download that only requires your email address).  Install the application.

If you do not want itunes to be your default player, make sure you uncheck these boxes during installation

Be warned the itunes installation is long and slow.  Its not like installing Microsoft Office or Vista upgrade slow, but for a music player it is ridiculously slow and long, even on a new, fast machine.

Even AFTER you install itunes, it still has to be configured!  Watch out for this gem, sure to ruin your day if you are not expecting it and just hit the next button repeatedly through the itunes configuration process.

And when the program finally does run for the first time, it tries to find my music files, but doesn’t allow me to tell it where I keep my files (portable hard drive) it just assumes I keep them in ‘My Music’, plus it then goes and cycles through every image and movie file on my hard drive. 

If you have gigabytes of music, as I do, be prepared for a bit of a wait on this step too.  (understandable having to wait on this part, but the other steps and slowness gets you just annoyed to forget that this one is probably normal) I have been buying cd’s for almost 20 years so I have hundreds of gigabytes of music .. . I started downloading itunes at 2:02 pm, by 2:28 pm I was at this stage and waiting for thousands of songs to get processed into my itunes installation. 

Update at 3:04 pm it was still trying to process, I noticed that for about 5 minutes, itunes just seemed to lock up, wouldn’t minimize, showed no status, I thought it had crashed and then it started up again, processing more songs.  (1 hour and waiting for music!)

OK, at 3:20, I noticed that it seemed to have ‘found’ all of my music, but its now converting some of those files that are in .wma file format.  (I didn’t approve this, and have no idea how long it will take, or even if I want these files converted, might be garbage or something for all I know.)

Don’t expect to have music in your Pre quickly!

Correction, If you have a Pandora account, you can get the Pandora App and start listening to music via Pandora very quickly, but that is not exactly YOUR music.  So if you must have music now, listen to Pandora while Apple itunes wastes a couple hours of your computer cycles.

Once you FINALLY have itunes running, this is the screen you should see to start the actual import process of music to your Palm Pre. 

Congratulations You Survived! 

The Palm Pre is excellent at managing contacts even though they limit themselves largely to the pitfalls of working with gmail and facebook (as opposed to say Outlook, Plaxo or Linkedin, much better professional sources for contacts), but the music side of this device is a little over looked in its initial release.