Using Winamp to Manage your Mobile Music Collection

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For all the arms races of keeping up to date with the PC Suites (yep, plural, there are three now!), versions of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, there are some that opt out. There are some that decide the best thing is to go old-school and rely on file managers and direct copy and pasting of files. For beginners, the Nokia Music Manager will move over enough of their collection to satisfy them.

For everyone else, there’s Winamp.

The long standing media player, currently the second most popular player after the aforementioned (and bundled) Windows Media Player, has many hidden talents, and one of them is talking to your Nokia S60 smartphone as a media device. So here’s a quick look at using Winamp to manage your mobile music.

 

Winamp's Media Library

 

First of all, connecting the device is a simple matter of using the “Music Player” option (on any XpressMusic devices like the N95, N81, N93, etc.) If you have your phone set up to ask what type of connection to make every time, then it’s an easy matter – otherwise jump into Settings | Connection | USB icon to flip the option over.

The key to using Winamp is one of the secondary screens – the media library. You call this up with Alt-L. Down the left hand side you’ll get a tree with all the views available to you. Of interest to us are two of these, Local Media/Audio and Portables/”Nokia Device”

First up, Local Media will let you see all the music files on your machine (and video as well, if you wish) but you do need to tell Winamp where your music collection lives. I’ve got everything in one directory, so can easily add this in the Preferences screen, but you can add in more than one location if that’s how you have everything set up on your hard disk.

 

Winamp loading the Portable Device

 

So now you have a nice big list of music that you can scroll through either by artist, by album, or by using the handy search box. No matter how you track them down, let’s assume you’ve found the music that you’ve just got to have on your smartphone (you can also just drag files into Winamp’s playlist and right click them from here to send them to your smartphone if you don’t want to use the media library).

Look down the left hand bar. See the entry under Portable Devices that says (currently in my case) 'Nokia N81 8GB'? Just drag the files from the media library to there and this will kick off the transfer. Too much work for you? Right click the music file and go for 'Send to: Nokia N81 8GB' for the same fast transfer.

There’s no intermediate sync list to go through, there’s no need to worry about the directory or structure on the device, Winamp just works, and truth be told, out of all the options for moving music to my smartphones, I use Winamp as the day to day option.

And it also allows you to create and edit your play lists as well, something that both Nokia’s Music Manger and Windows Media Player's sync facilities doesn't allow. For that reason alone, Winamp will be a very attractive option to a number of power users, including myself.

A right click on the entry in the side-bar will bring up the menu options to manage your play lists. Adding and moving files is done in exactly the same way as copying files from your PC to the smartphone – you can drag and drop into the play list; and if you’re browsing the music library on your smartphone, you can right click to send the file to the playlist.

When it’s all over, make sure to hit the ‘eject’ button in Winamp to stop the USB connection with the smartphone - the media library will have been updated already (and while it's not advisable to pull out any USB device without 'stopping' it - espeically while a file is being copied - it won't be disastrous), so you're ready to rock and roll. Just pick up the phone, and carry on listening to the Magic Carpet Ride with Steppenwolf. Or whoever…

-- Ewan Spence, Nov 2007