Previously, on Series 60
As mentioned, the capability to play back stereo music files has been one that has been available to Series 60 owners since the 6630, and there have always been two over-riding concerns. The physical controls have always had to tied into either the phone's keypad or the directional controls, and while smart programming will always be come up with a decent looking interface on the screen, there’s nothing that can be done about what buttons are available.
The other concern is one that every music device designer has to contend with… Namely how to get all your music from a desktop computer onto the device. When Symbian phones were the bleeding edge geek tools of choice, with only 4MB of memory and an MMC card, it was okay to leave the user to work out all the hoops to jump through. But as Series 60 moved into version 2, the built-in memory expanded, MMC (and SD) started to allow higher capacity storage to be available to more and more ‘regular’ users of the phones. The DIY option couldn’t be the main option (although it's still available, of course), and Nokia began to promote the “Nokia Audio Manager” that came bundled with PC Suite. While the Audio Manager made sure you were putting the tracks in the right place, it was unwieldy once you got beyond around 25 tracks (around 100MB of regularly encoded music). There was little in the way of hand holding for the user, and while in essence it was a file manager, it never tried to hide this from the user – as a result it’s a pretty daunting piece of software for new smartphone users.
Opening a New Window on Music
With the ‘consumer grade’ music phones now appearing from Nokia (namely the N91 and the 3250) a new solution is needed, and Nokia have turned away from their in-house solution to go with one of the emerging “standard” ways of doing things.
You can’t help fail to notice the almost over-powering presence of Apple in portable music nowadays. With the iPod they have the leading portable music player, but the real strength in the package is in the iTunes application on the desktop computer, which talks to both the iPod and the iTunes Music Store. Providing a good environment to find music on your computer (and to buy it if you have a sudden need for some Status Quo), and the ability to get that music easily onto your device propelled the little white iPods to the one of the most desirable consumer devices of the 21st century.
The only catch is that the iTunes software isn’t realistically available to any music device other than those made by Apple – it's their software, so they can do what they feel is best. But as Motorola (currently the only manufacturer to support iTunes) and their ROKR1 phone illustrate, the restrictions put in place negate the benefits of a large media player. The licence to only store 100 tracks transferred via iTunes limits the ROKR’s appeal somewhat, and it’s telling that later ROKR phones don’t have the iTunes ‘compatibility’ feature.
While I’m sure Nokia did approach Apple about using iTunes (after all, the S60v3 web browser is based in part on the same core elements as the Apple Safari browser) they have turned to Microsoft for a solution. The Windows Media Player application does a pretty good job at managing your music files on your PC, and getting them onto a number of portable devices. Nokia announced the Windows Media tie-in at 3GSM 2005, and this is one of the first fruits of that endeavour.
Windows Media Player and Nokia’s Music Phones In Practice
There’s not a lot to write about here. You plug your USB data cable into your music phone, and choose ‘Media Player’ from the three options (the others are ‘[USB] Mass Storage’ and ‘PC Suite’). It then shows up as a music device, and Windows Media Player will allow you to synchronise the device with your music collection. Once the sync is over, you unhook the cable and away you go. Very painless.
On your first connection, you can choose between either automatic or manual syncing. I suspect that most people are going start with manual syncing – all you have to do is find the track you want to end up on your phone, drag it to the list of files to be synced, and then press the sync button. The files then get placed in the right place on the device, unplug the USB cable, and away you go.
Taking music from a CD is just as easy. Pop in the CD, let Windows Media Player ‘rip’ the contents to your computer, and then drag and drop the resulting file over to the sync list. An average CD takes about five minutes from popping the CD into the drive to listening to it on your phone, and most of that time is taken in the ripping process.
The other option is to let Windows Media Player automatically sync your music to your phone, and whether you use this option depends on many things, not least the size of your phone and what you want to sync. Assuming you don’t try to sync your entire collection, you can select playlists to move over whenever your phone is attached. My set-up has three playlists that are synced over...
- Music rated at 4 or 5
- Fresh Tracks (yet to be played, rated)
- 100 Shuffled Tracks
These three playlists are pretty self explanatory. Windows Media Player allows you to rate each track with a star rating, the top being five stars. So using this means I know my favourite tunes will always be on the device. When I make a track up into this score, I know the next auto sync will put it on the phone. Fresh tracks are those that are yet to be played or rated, so if I’ve dumped a new “Slade” album into the system, I’ll get the chance to listen to this on my music phone as well.
The final playlist is the shuffled tracks. This is a random playlist that will select 100 tracks and put them onto the device, which is good for keeping my ears alight. The conditions are below, but note that I’ve added a “do not include soundtracks” into this playlist – I have a lot of TV theme tunes of about 20 seconds long that aren’t my cup of tea when out and about, so this way I know I won’t get them on my phone.
What about Non Windows Users?
Of course, there are those who believe in the power of another operating system, and while they don’t have the supreme ease of use that Windows Media Player offers, the Nokia Music player application makes it as easy as possible if you’re using regular tools. By placing the phone into ‘Mass Storage’ mode when the connectivity cable is applied, you can use your computer’s file explorer to move music files onto either the storage card (for the Nokia 3250) or the internal hard drive (on the N91). The music player will look in one folder (the /Music/ folder on your storage card or internal drive) and index all the tracks there based on their ID3 tags (the track information that is embedded into every music track), so although Windows Media Player maintains a nice directory structure of artists, and then sub directories of album names, you can safely dump everything into the main folder and let the indexing take care of the rest.
It’s a good ‘anytime anywhere’ solution, there’s very little that can go wrong with copying files, and allowing the application to index the directory means you don’t have to worry about the exact placement of the files. It’s still a bit more technical than I’d hoped for an end user, but then people running Linux (or to a certain extent Macs) seem to know their way around computers a bit better.
It’s All About The Music
We’ve come a long way and the solution now on offer, at least for Series 60, is very attractive. The ease of use is pitched at just the right level, and you don’t need to spend hours working out what to put where, or in what format. You can just drop your music into your phone and leave, knowing you can find it again in a few seconds.
With Nokia already significantly out-selling Apple's iconic iPod in terms of music-capable smartphones, this new ease of use and integration should bode well for continued convergence. If you're a regular AAS reader then the chances are that you've been using your smartphone as your music player for a couple of years at least. But with the Media Player tie-up, the last remaining technical barriers for new users have been removed.