Following on from last week's look at the PIM suite on Symbian smartphones and what you can do to suggest changes, Ewan turns to one of his favourite apps... the music player. How would he change this application, in terms of integrating more media sources and online feeds? And, along the same lines, I've exclusive news about an old Symbian OS music favourite that's now branching out to include video. Read on for extracts, links and more...

First of all, Ewan's Music player musings and wish-list:

"So it's time for the music player to have a reworking, and I want to look at three areas – content, online consumption and social activities around music.

Content on the device

Or, how do you solve a problem like video? While music has a consistent set of metadata (artist, album, track name and number, length, genre, etc), the same is not true of video, which makes it a little bit harder to sort. But it's crazy that you have to have more than one media player on your device. I'd look at a way to wrap up the music player with the video player (which itself would bring YouTube and other online video services under the hood)."

Read on in his full article. 

And also note a (coincidentally) similar piece yesterday by James Whatley over at The Really Mobile Project, looking at ways of using Flickr-like tags to enhance music playback on a mobile device.

Now for the exclusive. Stuart Fisher was the author of OggPlay, a .ogg music playing utility for S60 2nd and 3rd Edition, but he abandoned development around 2007. However, now he's back and has started re-writing OggPlay from scratch. The main thing that got him interested again was the possibility of doing video. The Ogg Theora codec has now reached a degree of maturity and since it's being backed as a HTML5 codec by Firefox, more people are going to be using it. Theora 2 (aka 'VP8') has recently been open-sourced by Google, so the whole thing has a lot of potential.

The new version of OggPlay has reached the point where it plays Theora clips very well (on an N82 anyway) but Stuart hasn't started writing the user interface yet, so it's all a bit fiddly at the moment. Which is where you start to come in.

Stuart's looking for alpha (and beta) testers, people willing to try OggPlay out, report bugs and generally suggest ways in which it should improve. Why not get involved and have your say in this next generation media player?

Full details of OggPlay are at http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbianoggplay

The alpha 0.30 test release is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbianoggplay/forums/forum/294908/topic/3728176

If you have a look on OggTV.com, they have quite a few clips in Theora format that you can try, including  a couple of episodes of Thundercats! HTTP streaming works so you can also listen to vorbis radio stations too.

Finally, you can contact Stuart Fisher here. Have fun, and best wishes for the project, all!

Steve (AAS)