Review: Strands Social Music Player

Score:
68%

Author: Strands, inc

Version Reviewed: 3.2

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Strands is an online music service which takes a note of all the music you listen to and then takes that information to build up a profile of your tastes, both to recommend you new music you might want to buy, or to find friends online who share the same weird taste of Hawkwind and Missy Dynamite.

There are a lot of these services, but the majority of them are based around using your PC or Mac's media player - i.e. at your desk. But music is a great mobile application, and that's where Strands has an advantage in their mobile client. It's been around for some time, but with a recent update to v3.2, it's time to take a look at one of the more fully rounded music discovery services for the S60 handsets.

The client is good, but misses a few basic tricks in the interface that negate the value of having my mobile music noted down, sliced, diced and analysed. I'm not convinced that the effort needed to use the Strands player in place of the built in Nokia player is balanced by the benefits of the music analysis.

Let's start with the additional features in the client over the built in player. First up is the ability to post the music you listen to on another similar service, Last.FM. This is what attracted me to the Strands player, as I have a good two or three years worth of musical data inside Last.FM... one of the drawbacks of these music recommendation services is you tend to get locked into the one you start to seriously use. Since the first version of Strands, there have been a number of other applications available to upload your track info to Last.FM (e.g. Mobbler, which I reviewed recently), so Strands is no longer the only player in this particular market.

It's actually quite simple to pass your data to Last.FM, you just add your username and password to that service in the Strands setting dialog, and after that just leave it alone to do everything in the background.

The key to making the Strands Music Player work on a mobile phone is to make it as seamless as possible - you have to assume that the user is completely au fait with the built in music player, so if you're going to step in and replace that player with one of your own, it'd better not have me looking back at the original player and thinking ‘I want to switch back.'

Unfortunately, that's exactly what it does do

 

There are numerous little gotchas, but straight away, on launching the application, you hit the first one. You have to refresh the library after adding any music to your device, even if you've already refreshed the main player (and it takes a lot longer to do a refresh in Strands than the Nokia software); once that's over, you'll find all your playlists aren't copied over into the Strands application (and reconstructing them in the player is a pain); and while it's not a massive problem, the indexing and searching feels slower.

What's it like to navigate and listen to your music collection with Strands? To be honest, a touch frustrating. It seems to be a little slower than the built in application, especially when scrolling through lists of Albums or Songs - it seemed to pause and have to read from the memory card, causing the display to jump around as it caught up with keypresses. It was also sluggish to respond to any keypresses affecting the playback of the music.

But most importantly, and rather frustratingly, it doesn't use the dedicated music playback keys (on, for example, the N95). Hit the play/pause buttons and you start the Nokia player, not the Strands player, even if it's the foreground application. I suspect there are technical reasons why overriding the primary function of these keys has not been implemented, but try explaining that to the regular user when they have two tunes playing at the same time. And if the freeware Screenshot application can intercept the camera capture key, there must be hooks in the OS somewhere.

While the side keys work for the volume, I'm guessing it must be a global sound function over all the applications which allows this, and not something smart done by the Strands application. The problem here is that even a slight drop in performance compared to the built in app is going to be instantly noticed by the users. Strands needs to be doing this better, faster and stronger than what we're used to if it wants to be used.

All this is a shame, because underneath these small problems is a nice little audio player, with all the options you'd expect and navigation options that have become de rigeur, but augmented by the online services of Strands.

At any point when listening to your music, you can ask Strands to point you to artists or songs that are similar to what you are listening to - in many cases you'll have the option to listen to a 30 second sample of the track and are then smoothly returned to the track you were listening to on your phone. These sampled tracks can then be added to playlists and when you head to the main Strands web site you'll have the choice of various Amazon regions, iTunes, Buy.com and Walmart to buy the tracks it discovers for you.

You can also find people who share the same musical tastes with you, 'friend' them in the service and use that as an avenue to discover new music as well.

All of this is technically brilliant, but the Strands mobile player has to be judged on what you have on offer via the handset, and frankly it  is just missing the ease of use exhibited by the built in music player; those extra services offered don't make up the difference. Given time and a much more tightly focussed application that integrates with the built in software rather than duplicating its functionality, the Strands Social Player could be very compelling. I'll be watching with keen interest for future versions that hopefully polish up the edges of this application, especially in terms of hardware integration.

-- Ewan Spence, September 2008

 

Reviewed by Ewan Spence at 17:57 UTC, September 14th 2008