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:

Hi all! Back from holidays? I am..

Just wanted to let you know S60 Internet Radio SIS packages are now re-signed and installation will work without any problems. Just grab them here.

-Jukka

Pjotro, the man with the music suit, will be performing on a future episode of the late night TV show Last Call with Carson Daly!

For those of you that haven't heard of Pjotro head on over to his site where you can make music and watch him dance to it. Also check out Pjotro Vs DJ EFFeX the beatbox battle to determine, who is music?
I wish I could watch this show but I'm not in the US.

Pjotro - The man with the musical suit
Originally uploaded by Pjotro.

Source: Pjotro's Blog

Some of the most common questions we hear from S60 multimedia developers concern the differences in multimedia support among different S60 devices. Because the multimedia feature set in a given device depends in large part on the device hardware, different devices may support different audio and video codecs. These hardware dependencies also affect the SDK; a particular API may only work with a subset of the supported codecs in the device.

My colleague Florin Lohan came up with a clever way to get to the bottom of this problem, and find out more about these hardware issues for you in the developer community. He wrote a simple S60 application that lists the codecs supported in the device, and ran it on every S60 device he could find to compile a comprehensive list of devices, API's, and codecs. You can download it and try it out on your favorite S60 device.

Read on for more info about the codecs and API's. We plan to publish this information to Forum Nokia as well in the near future.

-Oren

Darla reports about the first music EP recorded on a mobile phone, and interviewed the composer, Omri Levy. Omri used the Alon MP3 Dictaphone propgram to record his 10-song EP "about:blank" on his Nokia N80.

The Alon software records MP3 files up to 96kbps @ 16 kHz. That's more or less FM radio quality (but of course the phone microphone is not exactly what you would find in a studio). I'm trying to find out more technical details about how Omri did the recording, and will report back what I learn.

Update: Omri reports that he did indeed use the N80 microphone and the maximum settings of the Alon software. He writes: "I know that the sound quality is far from being perfect but if i wanted a 'perfect sound' I would have used my own studio. In most cases I would rather listen to someone recording himself on a 4-track than listen to a bright and shiny production. So the Nokia N80 was more than enough for me." (On his wishlist: overdubbing on the phone)

Let me know if you come across other mobile recordings. Maybe this is a new tool for the Lo-Fi world?

-Oren

Nokia is helping to bring free WiFi networks to 10 major parks in New York City, starting with Central Park and Battery Park. If you have an N80 or N91 phone, you can download a free software suite that will let you enjoy news and music when you're sitting in the park (or anywhere else with a WiFi connection).

The suite includes the ParkCast Internet radio player, which, we are proud to say, is based on the open source Internet Radio for S60 software we created in the S60 Multimedia team. The Park WiFi team also created a version of ParkCast for the Nokia 770 Internet tablet.

The ParkCast player is pre-configured with links to high-quality streams from four New York radio stations, which I was able to listen to from my WiFi network in Boston. Of course, it wasn't quite the same without the benches and trees.

I answered my own question from an earlier post, about options for synching USB Mass Storage (MSC) devices with Winamp. The gUSB plug-in for Winamp adds support for MSC devices, and so lets you copy music to your phone directly from Winamp. It doesn't do much more than that, however. There is no real synchronization of tracks or playlists, and no way to specify which folder on the phone will store the music. In other words, you're better off just copying your music to the phone using the Windows File Explorer, as Phil described in the See into S60 blog.

[Note: on E-Series devices, MSC is called "Data Transfer". Thanks to S60Tips.com for this info.]

Of course, Winamp now supports MTP, so you can connect your N91 or other S60 3rd Edition N-Series phone that way as well. As you might expect, though, the Winamp support for MTP is not as complete as what you find in Windows Media Player; it doesn't sync playlists, for example.

Perhaps a better option, if you use Windows and prefer not to use iTunes or Windows Media Player, is MediaMonkey. The free version of this media manager also recognizes MSC devices, but provides much more flexibility. You can specify where on the device to store your music (for example, organized in folders by artist and album), and set up automatic synchronization of tracks and playlists. It can also update the metadata and album art in your collection, by downloading information from Amazon (your choice of several countries). This is a fairly easy way to add album art to your music before moving it to your phone.

If you're a Last.fm user (or know someone who is), you may know about Audioscrobbler, the engine behind Last.fm. Audioscrobbler provides a plugin protocol so that music player applications can update the server with the music you play, and exposes a set of public web services that let you access data and recommendations about Last.fm members and their favorite music.

What I haven't seen (so far) is any mobile interfaces to the Audioscrobbler database. In an attempt to fill this gap (and encourage others to experiment), I wrote a couple of simple Python scripts for S60 devices that demonstrate some of the query features of the Audioscrobbler API (This also gave me a chance to learn Python!). Read on for the details.

Of course, Last.fm is not the only social music game in town. Other services, like MusicStrands, are already experimenting with mobile clients, and offer their own public API's.

We just added a Wiki to our Internet Radio for S60 open source project. I started things off with a basic User Guide and FAQ, based in part on your comments to earlier blog posts. Please add information about your experiences using the application and developing with the code.

-Oren