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...
Read on in the full article.
New OggPlay! That's brilliant! I will be busy this weekend, but I will be sure to try it next week!
I think this is the main flaw for Nokia devices, the default music player can't play ogg. Android devices can.
Yeah and don't forget full UPNP / DLNA support (controlpoint, renderer and server)
Timely article by Ewan. I also read the article on reallymobile, and agree with the thoughts in there too.
Since getting a 5230, I have had a real good go at trying to use the phone as my music player, but there are a few issues which keep me reaching for my N810.
Last.fm scrobbling support - What we need is a simple service which keeps a record of what you listen too and posts. Mobbler is great (and is on my phone), but you need to start it manually, and it stops the remote control buttons on my AD-54 headset from working which is a massive pain for me.
Album art - this seems to be a real hit and miss affair, and needs tidying up. I have reset the art on the phone, only for the changes to be lost the next time I restart.
One touch random - Or as I call it, a personal radio button. I hate any music player which takes more than a couple of clicks to start playing the library randomly. Thsi should be an option on the front screen. I know you can go to all songs, and then play, and then skip to the next track, but a option on the front screen would be better.
Nice thoughts about the music player, and thoughts I share. There's an idea about this over at ideas.symbian which could be appended to the conversation to not just make this an editorial piece, but an advocacy one: http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=1586
Getting eyes and votes to this an other music player ideas will push change along faster.
I would like a Nokia Music Player which allows you manually select or auto watch only certain music folders, so when you refresh, your library isn't filled with ringtones and sound files from other applications. (Likewise with the Gallery.) 😊
there are many good ideas in ideas.symbian.org
nokia just cant make them a reality
allow users to select which drive to store data when the bluetooth transfered file is received. Which is found in x6
divx xvid video codec for media player
vlc for symbian, upgraded built in realplayer
flac format support in music player to play high res video
allow user to customize the theme
setting menu ui should be somehing like maemo5 setting menu
show all the installion pop out message in one message window
and my last dream app that will not come true
an p2p app to share music files, video file and games sis with users around the world
With function like folder play, sleep mode, skin mode and mini player on standby screen, TTpod really outgun the default player.
Steve/Ewan,
Good article, thanks. Speaking of video, your challenge, should you choose to accept it 😊 is to please do a similar article to this, looking at video players, and specifically the most used downloadable-video format on the net, DivX/Xvid. And even more specifically, find out what the solution is to playing that on S60 5th Edition, and more to the point, Symbian ^ 3 (i.e. the N8 for starters).
Because currently we have a situation where all recent Nokia S60 phones, and the N8, can't play the internet's most popular video format (Divx) without a load of horrible conversion, and then it doesn't look good on TV via the TV Out cable.
There is a LOT of demand for this. Given the N8 specs (incl graphics chip etc) there should be NO reason why we can't put a full-fat, full-size, full frame rate, HD DivX/Xvid file, onto the N8 without any conversion whatsoever, plug it into an HD telly bia the HDMI port, and watch it full res. with Dolby Surround Sound. This should be entirely possible, and yet it is not. Similarly we should be able to use current S60 5th Ed. phones as portable media players, and play standard 700MB DivX feature films, off our phones and into our tellys.
The one great hope on Symbian prior to S^3, Coreplayer, are taking forever and a day making something that works on S60 5th, so I don't think it can be relied on anymore. CorePlayer is great on S60 3rd, if you tweak the settings it is possible to watch full size/frame rate DivX files on your TV from your phone and not tell the difference with a DVD. That is impressive.
The first thing that needs to be done is shamelessly copy the iphone music player(and I'm not talking about coverflow). And you need to be able to just start typing to search wherever you are on phones with keyboards.
I have visited your mention links from where I have found the theme of the Symbian smartphones. I want to change its background because it not looks as bright as required. And second thing is that I want to change its color combination.
What about friggin' gapless playback?
The new playback engine for OggPlay is gapless by design, but, there's lots of work to do before you'll get a user interface that let's you select an album to play. I might, as a stop-gap measure, make m3u's that you drop in E:\ogv work properly (at the moment it just plays the first entry). Yeah, I'll definitely try to do that for the next alpha release.