Review: Nokia Internet Radio

Released from Nokia’s Beta Labs last week, as Nokia World 2007 opened, was Nokia’s Internet Radio. On the face of it, this is a simple application, but as with most things, sometimes the simple things are the best.

Broadband users, for a long time, have taken for granted the ability to listen to radio stations from around the world over the internet. There are a number of standards that can be used – RealAudio, Windows Media and MP3 Streaming. Currently, Nokia Radio supports MP3 streaming (updated - it also works with AAC streams as well), and hopefully the others are on the way. This means that not all the radio stations online around the world are available – and that includes the BBC. I’ve a sneaky suspicion that getting Radio 4 into the application is at the top of the feature wish list.

What makes Internet Radio such a great application? After all, there are already a number of Internet radio solutions kicking around the S60 catalogues. Let’s start with discovery. The application comes with a centrally managed (by Nokia) index of radio stations from around the world. You can navigate around this by country, by genre or by popularity. One click on a station and it will start playing. You can also add it to your 'favourites' list so you can get back to the stations as fast as possible.

Impressively, the radio continues to play when you’re navigating around the application, and also in the background while in other apps. It’s incredibly stable in terms of coding - there’s no noticeable slowdown in the other applications. One cute touch, whenever you start a new station, it does buffer (and the visible buffer bar filling up is a great UI touch) but once it starts to play it fades up from no volume – and when you switch stations, the old station fades out as the other one fades in. It’s not necessary, but it helps.

The rest of the interface stays as close as possible to the existing Music Player. It looks like it, with the central selection button for play and pause, the volume control on the side buttons, and the directory even feels very like the podcast directory. In other words, it is a consistent interface across the S60 music applications and that’s important as these devices reach the mass market.

One addition, which is specific to Internet Radio, is that the 'down' keypress brings up the information supplied by the radio station. It might be about the show, the technical details on the stream, how to get in touch with the host or the web site. If the station has it set up, you’ll also get a playlist of the music you’ve been listening to.

On a mobile device, your bandwidth is never guaranteed. You could be on GPRS, or a 3G connection, or a free flowing Wi-Fi connection. In 'Preferences' you can limit the amount of data you try to bring down during a connection – and, rather than present numbers, the simple paradigm remains here, with you choosing 'standard', 'high' or 'best' quality.

Nokia Internet Radio is a lovely application. There are still rough edges, not least that RealAudio and Windows Media support is needed; and I’d also like to see it integrated into the Ovi launcher under the Music tab, but perhaps that’s waiting until a v1.0 release. Even now I would still strongly recommend this application for everyone, even the casual user.

Now, if only this could be linked into the alarm clock so the radio wakes me in the morning, as opposed to a beeping N81... [Now there's an idea - go for it, Beta Labs! - Ed]

Ewan Spence, AllAboutSymbian, 11 Dec 2007

Review Discussion

Guys and gals, I’ve made some VERY serious tests.

First, my generic remarks:

1. Will it receive aacPlus v2 (aka aac+ v2 and HE-AAC v2 ) support some time? Right now, it only (fullY) supports the, in webcasts, very-very rarely used AAC-LC / HE-AAC streams. Sure, it does play aacPlus v2 streams too, but downsampled and in mono only, while the vast majority of these streams are stereo, even at 24 / 32 kbps, and only really the slowest (around 10 kbps) are mono. (AAC decoders can be used to decode aacPlus v2 at a much lower sound quality, as was also the case with the MP3 Pro / standard MP3 set-up.) And, of course, Music Player in the N95 already contains aacPlus v2 support (a decoder) – why not use it?
   
   This question is particularly topical as most mainstream Windows Mobile players doesn’t really have HE-AAC v2 support as can also be read HERE and if they do, with pretty large CPU (and, consequently, battery) usage; some of the most popular ones (for example, Pocket Player) not even plain AAC support (as yet). Seamless aacPlus v2 support on Symbian could be the killer application even for some WinMo users (if you want to make the platform more appealing to them, that is).
   
2. Please add HTTP RealOne support. Currently, the built-in RealPlayer only supports RTSP (as opposed to HTTP), which means it can’t stream in a NAT (the majority of mobile phone operators). As RealPlayer already has a RealAudio decoder, if it’s easily iterfaceable from the outside, doing this can’t be that hard, particularly because SHOUTcast/ Icecast also use HTTP. That is, you can just reuse most of the already-existing HTTP streaming code.
   
   This would be just GREAT because, as has also been pointed out in the “sneak peek” of my forthcoming Multimedia Bible, Windows Mobile severely lacks HTTP RealAudio streaming (except for the Mplayer port, but it only runs on 624 MHz Xscale CPU’s, using it almost entirely and meaning about 2-2.5 hours of battery life). If Symbian wants to be better than Windows Mobile, then, this is one place where it can become better :)
   
   Feel free to ask for more info on all this because I’m (also) a networking engineer and know these protocols like the palm of my hand.
   
3. The same stands for WMA streaming. Seamless (!) WMA streaming one of the best features of Windows Mobile. On Symbian, only CorePlayer offers it - and, as of the current version, sucks like hell at it.
   
   Again, programmatically, it can't be complicated to implement it as, behind the curtains, it uses either RTSP (referred to by "MMS" - long gone are the days of MMS being a completely different protocol) or HTTP. You don't need to implement the former - HTTP would just suffice. And, again, you already have HTTP streaming support, which wouldn't needed to be modded.
   
   All this, of course, requires that you have access to the WMA decoder of the built-in Music Player - just like the case with the RealAudio decoder of RealPlayer.
   
4. The bug several of you’ve already reported in the previous AAS thread, that is, app’s inability to start is a real pain in the back because it necessitates removing the app altogether and reinstalling it. You can very easily reproduce the bug (if you haven’t already run into it) by just clicking THIS 24k aac+ v2 link. After you exit the radio player, upon a subsequent restart, it’ll no longer run and you’ll need to completely reinstall it. (Tested on the N95 with firmware version v20; tested with both the internal memory and the card)
   
5. It doesn’t register the M3U extension, only PLS. This should be changed – after all, it’s SHOUTcast / Icecast / MP3-compliant and many radio stations use MP3.
   
6. What about adding OGG support? ;) In several countries, where aacPlus v2 isn’t (at all) used, for example, Finland, it’s still the only way to converse bandwidth (as opposed to the about two time more bandwidth-wasting MP3 streams). (I whish I Finnish stations switched to aacPlus v2 though so that they could become accessible with GPRS only.) The only Symbian networking app to play OGG streams, oggplay, severely sucks and the current version of CorePlayer sucks too at streaming.
   
7. I’ve created a demo web page where you can test the different stream types, M3U extension etc. It also links to some link repositories. It’s available HERE.

Second, in addition to my past tests (see THIS), some additional 24 kbps + GPRS power usage tests taking over an hour total:

A 24 kbps 44 kHz stereo aacPlus v2 stream playback (of course, as there is no aacPlus v2 support, only in mono and 22 kHz):



24 kbps 24 kHz mono MP3 stream playback:



Both via the built-in speakers (unlike with the prev. test, where I utilized A2DP too) at moderate volume.

As can clearly be seen, AAC and MP3 playback consume approximately the same power AND the results are pretty similar to those published earlier. (Don’t forget that these are 2G results, not 3G ones! A 3G connection would have had about 600 mW more power usage.)

Hope this is also read by the Nokia engineers so that they can really think about implementing / doing what I’ve stated.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unregistered No BBC - not much use in the UK then ! Do let us know if this changes

To my knowledge, BBC only uses RA / WMA(?). This is why I'm pushing HTTP (!!!!!) RA and WMA streaming that much - they can't be that hard to implement as

1, the RealAudio / WMA decoders are already present
2, HTTP streaming is already supported and needs to be only slightly modded / extended (for example, during the initial handshaking with the remote Windows Media Encoder / server so that it notifies the player isn't able to receive streams over RTSP (MMS)).

Quote:

Originally Posted by desertrat Impressive that Nokia are actually starting to think. I am very not impressed that the builtin Realplayer stops playing when switching to another app - multitasking anyone?

Actually, if you switch from realplayer during it's 'Loading....' phase, it seems it doesn't notice and so will continue playing, even though it's in the background.

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