Review: Nokia Music Pack
Score:
63%
Coinciding with the release of the 'Nokia 6630 Music Edition', Nokia announced (and shipped) the 'Nokia Music Pack', a kit of accessories designed to turn all those other millions of 6630s into Music Editions too. But what's in it and is it worth buying?
In truth, the launch of the Music Edition had a lot of savvy 6630 owners rather puzzled, as we'd already been listening to stereo music on our smartphones for the best part of a year. Admittedly, a small amount of technical expertise was required, to copy digital music files (e.g. MP3) onto your DV RS-MMC card using a USB card reader, and a slightly larger amount needed to encode your CD music tracks into Ogg Vorbis rather than MP3, thus gaining twice as much music per megabyte. You'd hope that a new music kit would make at least part of the process a lot easier, but you're in for a bit of a disappointment.
The Nokia Music Kit is essentially compatible with the 3230 (in mono, though - urgghhh), 6630 and 6680/81/82. Its components are:
- Nokia 256 MB MMCmobile Card MU-9 (normally about £20)
- Nokia Audio Adapter AD-15 (£13)
- Nokia USB MMC/SD Reader DD-10 (£10)
- Nokia Audio Cable CA-72U (Previously unavailable from Nokia, say £10 value, max)
- Nokia Music Player (on the above card, this is a dedicated MP3/AAC player, as shipped with the 6681)
The raw economics show a slight saving over the raw ingredients, but that's only if you were going to buy all of them anyway. For most people, buying the bits they need separately will make more sense, especially as you'll be wanting a 512MB card, to fit on twice the music (golden rule of computing - NEVER skimp on memory/storage). The Audio Adapter is for plugging in a standard 3.5mm headphone set, although your smartphone already comes with a stereo headset of pretty high quality and includes a call answer/terminate button, which you won't find on your standard set. The USB card reader is neat and nifty, though you can pick these up for next to nothing from the high street these days. The audio cable is a simple 3.5mm to twin-phono lead that can be bought from any good music equipment shop, and the Music Player application doesn't offer anything that the default RealPlayer doesn't already do.
If the above analysis sounds rather scathing then it doesn't perhaps do justice to the fact that Nokia have at least tried to bring some order to the mess that's currently DIY music on your Nokia/Symbian smartphone. The theory is that, for the beginner, everything's here in one pack and no research is needed whatsoever.
Unfortunately, an end to end music solution needs much more than mere hardware. Nokia's current scheme is for users to use PC Suite's very limited Nokia Audio Manager. This fails firstly having no CDDB-type facility, meaning that users have to type in all track names by hand, and secondly by having an inefficient and confusing interface: the user has to rip tracks in one mode, then switch to the other one, hope the tracks are still selected (they won't be if the user closes the program in the meantime), choose a destination on the expansion card (surely this should be the default!) and finally click on 'Transfer'. For the amount of work involved, the user might as well use CDex or a similar utility to rip their CDs to Ogg Vorbis format and then use OggPlay to play the music in far more efficient form.
There's a flimsy fold-up paper manual with the pack, but it's vague in the extreme when it comes to making your music files. Clever money in the Symbian world is on Nokia's licensing deal with Microsoft bearing fruit soon, with a proper Media Player sync solution and support for WMA files (as efficient as Ogg Vorbis), but this is just speculation at the moment. Until such a solution comes to pass though, music playing on the Nokia 6630 is far fiddlier than it needs to be. Techies like me are used to messing around with codecs, files and folders. The man in the street is going to want something simpler than this.
Still, the Nokia Music Pack is basically a hardware bundle. If you were thinking about some of these components anyway, this is a convenient way to buy that will save you hassle. Just be prepared to put in a little elbow grease as well and don't be surprised when you run out of room on the 256MB card.
Steve's alternative Music Pack: CDex (Open Source), OggPlay (Open Source) and spend your £45 on a 512MB card, fitting on four times as much music as with MP3 (or three times as much as with AAC) on the Nokia Music Pack's 256MB card.
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at