S60 Open to new features

As many of you noticed the updated Music Player in S60 Feature Pack 1 lists Music and Podcasts separately. Some of the S60 devices with the new Music Player include N82, N95, N95 8GB, and N81. Now you may be wondering what's the difference between Music and Podcasts, and how does the Music Player know what is a Song and what is a Podcast episode?

The main difference between Music and Podcasts is that audio in the Podcasts section will automatically save the place of where you last listened. It works like this, let's say you have a 30 minute train commute to work and you have an hour long episode of TWiT that you want to listen to. You start listening to TWiT when you leave your home and head for work, when you reach your work after listening for 30 minutes you Stop playing the Podcast episode. When the playback is Stopped the position where it was playing is saved. Then when you start playing the same episode of TWiT again on your commute back home it will start playing from where you left off. The position will also be saved if you are playing a Podcast and then skip forward to another episode. The benefit of this feature of course is that when you continue listening to a Podcast you already partially listened to, there is no need to fast forward through the stuff you already heard. If you want to start from the beginning of the episode again simply start playing it then press Left on the keypad, this will start playing the episode from the beginning and remove the previously Saved position. Music Tracks listed in the Music category will not save the last played position when music playback is stopped.

So now that you know the difference between the Music and Podcasts section how does the Music Player know what's a Podcast episode and what's a Music Track?

There are 2 ways that audio is categorized automatically as being a Podcast:
1. The audio file has Podcast as the Genre in it's meta data.
2. The audio file is saved in the Podcasts directory on the Phone Memory or Memory Card.
If you use the S60 Podcasting application to download an audio episode, most audio files will be saved in the Podcast/Sounds/ directory and thus will automatically be categorized as a Podcast.

Tip: If you find a Podcast has been listed in the Music category you can move it under the Podcast category in order to use the Last Played Position feature. Highlight the Title of the track and press Options -> Song details. Scroll down to the bottom where the last detail says Library: Music. Change that from Music to Podcast and then confirm the move. The audio file will then be moved into the Podcast section. To move a Music track from Podcasts to Music view the Episode details then select Music as the Library instead of Podcasts.

Not to be confused with the open source S60 Internet Radio which we have blogged about here in the past, the Nokia Internet Radio is a recently released application and service to round up the new Nokia Music offerings that include the Nokia Music Store and Nokia Podcasting.

First, the application can be downloaded here. While the current list of compatible devices is rather limited (only N82, N91, N95, N95 8GB), the application should work with most S60 3rd edition and Feature Pack 1 smartphones. I guess it just hasn't been thoroughly tested with the rest of the devices so no guarantees!

Which one should you download? If your device is S60 3rd edition (E65, N93, N73 etc.), choose the installation file for N91; if you have a FP1 device (N76, E90, N81 etc.) than any of the rest will do. I installed the sis file for N95 on my E90 and it worked, albeit only on the external display.

Before I go on about the application, I have to mention that the "service" part of the Nokia Internet Radio is what, in my opinion, makes this internet radio experience awesome. The Internet Station Directory makes it a breeze for users to search and discover radio stations. The directory is monitored and constantly updated, so no more need for hunting down streaming links for new stations or removing dead links. You can also add your own station to the directory.

The Nokia Internet Radio supports MP3, AAC and AAC+ codecs broadcast over the internet using the Shoutcast streaming protocol. It can make use of your packet data (use Internet instead of WAP access point) or WLAN connections. I would recommend an unlimited 3G data plan because this can get quite addictive!

Since the application is still in beta (although quite mature for a beta release), there are still some quirks, which I believe (hope) will be changed in future releases. There seems to be no way to adjust the volume unless you have a device with dedicated (hardware) volume keys, and supported screen resolutions are only QVGA and 208x176. This means that on my E90, to adjust volume, I have to open up the app on the external screen first, then switch to the internal display, and use the volume function keys...

But let's get on with the good stuff, accompanied by some screen shots: