NokiaBetaLabs

An improvement over NMM, some misc items:

- Appallingly slow sync/transfer with N95 + 8GB MicroSDHC card (2+ hrs for 4GB - bah!)

- AAC missing from RIP format options, even though docs say it's supported. My library is currently all in eAAC+ format.

- Auto-transfer needs the option to convert formats (I'd prefer eAAC+ on the N95, but keep library in plain AAC on the PC).

@Thiago - While I completely agree with the desktop scrobbling request, you can already scrobble all tracks played on your device with this app:

http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2008/04/mobbler-scrobble-your-heart-...

I've been using it for a while and it works great. Just sits in the background and passes your tracks along to Last.FM.

Could you also implement an "album art fixer" code? For example I imported into my Nokia Music library a Cardigans album with art on the tag, and it showed up on Nokia Music, but when I transfered it to my phone it didn't show up because it wasn't the front cover or whatever. Have Nokia Music force the album art into being the front cover.

Not working on my XP SP3 too.

Thanks Mark, giving it a go now, will update soon.

Like it works great with my N95 very pretty :)

Thanks for your comments so far.

Couple of quick responses -

jeflon:
The 'Album Artist' issue we are aware of and working on.
Memory use is currently higher than we would like and we hope to reduce this soon. As for scrolling - there are some issues with .NET in this area but we have just been told that some enhancements with .NEt3.5 (due soon) resolve all of these :)

Ricky:
Thanks for posting your fix much appreciated!

James:
If you have your iTunes library in your 'MyMusic' folder this should automatically be imported into the Nokia Music library when you first start the application. If this didn't happen I'd be interested in hearing a bit more about your PC setup as this has been working fine for our testing team.

As for your comments on DRM - Digital music retailing is a fast changing business and the Nokia Music Store will be keeping pace, I am sure of that :)

John:
iTunes does not embedd art in its files in a way that is compliant with open standards. Nokia Music embeds the art into the file as ID3 'front-cover' so that the art shows on ALL media players and portable devices. If only iTunes did the same...
Still, I am happy to say that when the Music Store element is released you will be able to automatically retrieve album art using an AMG webservice - this is going to be a great way of making sure your art and other metadata is kept up to date in your music collection.

Phew - long post! I apologise in advance that I won't be able to respond to all your comments quickly but please keep them coming as this is invaluable feedback for us. Thanks again!

I'm no iTunes fan, but it can be used to manage "fair use" transfer of music to your personal handsets.

I use iTunes Agent on my wife's laptop to automatically sync MP4/AAC non-DRM to N82. You only need define which playlist in iTunes is the source and identify the handset using a text file as tag for the device (e.g. place a file called N82.txt on the SD card.)

Plug the N82 into the laptop in memory card mode and it just syncs down when you say go.

On Linux I store high quality FLAC encoded files. Using Amarok and its script plug-in "Transkode" music can be fed from FLAC to handsets transcoded as ACC/MP3/Ogg (or whatever you choose from gstreamer.)

Chinese character in the song information is not supported/ coded wrongly.

The most relevant to a music client is the option to living out all others music players (All things in 1). One of more interesting browsers (Firefox), able the users to make a lot of things in a unique software, and these feature could change the way that customer works in his PC.
World of music players is a chaos; you need of several apps to manager all your tasks:

The best for manage and download your podcasts:
-iTunes
The more useful and friendly interface:
-Winamp
The best way to sync your tracks for your Nokia in Windows:
-Windows Media Player
To discover new songs and scroble your tracks:
-Last.fm (Pandora looks fine, but not works in all countries as Brazil)

Hmm.. .NET based app, how easy is it to port that to linux and osx? I mean, if it's an itunes competitor (device-handler & music store app), then shouldn't osx and linux compability be a high prio to port to? What about the file size footprint, is .NET the reason why it's 60megs? I mean, winamp has basicly the same functionality (and more) and it's "only" 9 megabytes.

Don't get me wrong, the app looks killer and works just fine on my machine, but still is .NET really the way to go?

Does this mean I have 400mb used or 400mb free? http://junk.fwrnando.com/pointfour.jpg

(I figured out that is what I used, since when I hover above the phone icon on the left pane it says 0.3gb remaining)

Anyway, this is a little confusing, and there's really need to measure in gbs? When I'm only using a 1gb card.

I asked Nokia music to search for tracks to import into my music collection. I left it going for the whole day and night and it still said: "Nokia Music is searching for tracks to import into your music collection". I have restarted the import and the same thing has happened. What do I do? PLEASE HELP, THANKS!

App installed well on XP SP3 with all .net updates. Wouldn't import music from network drive, I should say it didn't see any files in subdirectories. Once music was copied locally app instantly started seeing the tracks regardless of organization.

My problem with Nokia's recent releases is they are becoming larger and larger. I can accept the use of .net but Nokia PC Apps have become bloatware.

Looks and feel very nice, but is it possible to make it work over Bluetooth?

Add: MS .NET Framework 1-3 and Service Packs are on the machine, same applies for security updates.

Can you make it possible to change the installer language before proceeding with the installation? Just something that might help people who, for some reason, due to the localization settings in Windows get a strange language as the defualt in setup.

Also, could you fix the music file association setup to work so that when "associate all supported files" (ok, I don't know what that is in English, as the interface was in Finnish for me) is unchecked, all the supported music filetypes are unchecked. I don't like to have to uncheck them all manually...

Everyone: we'll investigate the SP3 thing asap.

Problems I encountered:
- tremendous memory usage (200MB all processes counted)
- issues with displaying artist in different views (albums, tracks etc)
- a tad sluggish scrolling
- WMP11-like tag handling

I think that you should also ditch the album artist tag, since it causes more trouble than benefit to average user. If some songs on an album have album artist fields filled and the others don't, the program shows the album as different items.

Other than that, I really like the look and feel of the app.

Great app!

First impressions: I haven't had any issues yet. I have Vista and up-to-date machine, with 3 giga's of memory. Very snappy, looks great.

More as this developes.

I upgraded to SP3 just last week and the app is working fine for me - moving playlists to and from my N95 no problem.

Paul:
Connect in 'Media' mode and you will see your N95. This connection mode confusion is an issue for us - in future N series devices you will see a combined PC Suite/Media mode to make this less confusing.

dotNet is awful, but I finally got it to install.

First impressions:
1. Slowish, maybe it's just my pc (1.5ghz intel core solo, 512mb) or maybe I was trying to multitask too much, but 95mb of ram is a little too much for an audio manager.
2. It monitors music folders, yay! It automatically detected when I copied some music from an external HD to the my music folder using windows explorer, nice touch.
3. USB mode, can you make it so that when you plug a phone in PC Suite mode the app offers to change it to MTP mode?
4. Why does my .m3u playlists that I already had in the phone appear as an unknown artist?
5. The album/track lookup feature is VERY useful! Can it also embed album artwork?
6. The Queue concept seems a little convoluted, when you click the play button on a artist name bar, the queue should clear itself before adding the tracks. As it is now, you click it expecting to listen to tracks only by the artist you chose, but if you had another artist on the queue before it'll play again, confusing the user.
7. The same with tracks not having the "Album artist" tag showing up as "Unknown artist" in the "Tracks" view. It's a little confusing.

Ok, that's all for now :P I'm still poking around this app.

Ugh, I'm still fighting with .Net to get this app running! Earlier I was able to open Nokia Music PC Client and import 54GB of music. After a reboot, the app refuses to run, offering this error message:

There has been a problem starting Nokia Music. Running the Repair option for Nokia Music in the Add Remove Programs section of Windows Control Panel may resolve this problem.

It doesn't.

This looks promising though it still does not transfer album art across to the phone! It shows the album art when i browse my N95 8GB in the Nokia Music application but it's not visible on the phone. You shouldn't have to maunually add album art on the phone!

Loving the App! It's my default Music PlLayer.

Here's a few suggestions -

1. It would be good if this could replace the Nokia Music Manager.

2. Being able to Manage your Music in your phone via the application would be brilliant, Like managing your Albums, Artists etc.

3. The equalizer sounds could be improved on.

4. Plug-Ins would be a great feature for the Equalizer like special effects etc

After finally trying a few more things, I've gotten it to install.

@wesbar - It worked to transfer album art to my phone. I added the art through the desktop app and then synced, and the track showed my album art. Not sure what happened on your end.

@Anocton - You know there's a downloadable file for the Podcasting, to add it to any S60v3 handset, even if it doesn't have it built-in?

I've posted full thoughts on it here:

http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2008/05/the-nokia-music-pc-client-ha...

And also submitted those through the survey link up top, to keep in line with the purposes of the site.

Cool Stuff =D

I am Mac user, so no use for me. Well, perhaps one day Nokia won't be so MS centric in PC solutions.

First impressions:
Looks like iTunes copy. Also looks a bit too chunky (or retro) to me. I was expecting more new ideas not just copying.

I also was a bit disappointed about the general slowness of the whole application (or maybe it's just my PC). Maybe these issues will be sorted before official version.

Got the application working, I removed NET 2.0, NET 3.0 and NET 3.5. Installed NET 2.0 SP1 and the Nokia Music PC app that re-installed NET 3.0 and itself. I will post my comments on the functionality of the app later.

Agreed with AP :) good point

installed and ran it for the first time an hour ago... it's still scanning my music library (18gb) and taking up 20% cpu and 170mb Ram.

Talk about slow going!

y'know I can't help thinking that this is just a reinvention of the wheel, just slower and clunkier!

so now I have got installed:
iTunes
Media Monkey 3
Songbird 0.5
Nokia PC suite music manager
Nokia N Series Music manager
Windows Media Player.

all doing the same job as each other but for different devices. But 3 of these access their own music store - which I guess is real reason they exist and forve you to use them.

luckily for me, I've never bought digital music, nor ever will. (I buy physical music)

Didn't Nokia aquire Trolltech? I have a tip: why not use their Qt to make desktop apps as it would allow us to run these app on Mac and Linux too. Of course native Cocoa app would be acceptable too...

Me again.

I think it's great the way each album in the artist search results is separated with a horizontal line.

It would be even better to have a way of playing the entire album in a single click (without having to select all the tracks on the album and moving them to the Queue).

What you all are requesting is in other words iTunes...every thing you have said in this comments section is basically all the functions that itunes already has. Why not buy the next iPhone instead....then you have music player and phone in one and most importantely you have the best music program in the world iTunes

Hi everyone. The latest version is up now - thanks for all your comments so far a lot of your ideas have made it onto our 'backlog'.

Just a reminder to all Vista users: because of a bug in the original Beta you will need to MANUALLY uninstall any earlier versions of the Nokia Music PC Client before installing this new version.

The next update will be in about 6 weeks, and that is likely to be the 'final' Beta upgrade before our 'formal' release.

Will other devices be supported in the future? I own a N80 Internet Edition and I'd like to be supported from Nokia Music.

Well so far so good, since downloading the new improved Nokia PC Suite, I am very impressed, using the older version was near painful and very time consuming, but the latest even thought still in beta, is defferently an improvment, so far so good, one thing that needs addressing is, the adding of cover art to your ablums, from passed products I have used and added cover art to the albums, it was a simple as copy and paste, I manage to only work my way through this once first time round, this is only a cosmetic feature, but great when searching through your albums, otherwise so far so good, will post other issues as they come.

Nice application, big improvement over the existing Music Manager (faster this get replaced the better). I one of those on the nokia v apple decision loop, currently a heavy user of itunes mainly as its offers seamless integration with the device (ipod) and offers the best user experience over something like windows media player. But I keep hoping that Nokia get their act together for multimedia operations, the current pc suite offering is too diverse, too many small apps with lots of overlaps (add in several of these beta offerings and things get very confused). This is a step in the right direction...I await the follow up to keep me away from those iphone things! Add in podcasts, video, ringtones & recorder files and you might make me remove itunes!

I fully agree with Alex!!!

Great work. I am a user of itunes and trying to switch over my huge media library to Nokia Music PC App. Found a couple of problems in it and have certain suggessions.
A lot of work is needed to improve Navigation, espacially if you have a lot of music to search through. I love the itunes naviagation of artist , album and genre. Search is very fast as compared to itunes. There is some problem with the look of the media browsing UI. Scroll bars are small and there is no direct jump using key board. Some problems are there to display certain unicode characters. Album view have duplicate items for same album name and same is the case for Artist. Am I missing some thing or it is a problem. Miniplayer mode is cute.

As I would also love to use this as my PC media player. it would be very much helpful if it has some functionality like minimize to system tray and have some context menu for the system tray icon with commands like Pause, Stop, Next, previous and the a tooltip for currently playing track would be great addition.

I think the application is getting better and better.
I'm wondering it doesn't support live search and why Artist and Title are separated.
m

I managed to fix my music import problem by importing each of my music folders individually. This could be a problem with the program or maybe it was because NOKIA MUSIC IS VERY SLOW.

SUGGESTIONS:

1) MAKE IT FASTER -it is really slow and often crashes.

2) MORE OPTIONS - E.g like Itunes being able to say whether your album is part of a compilation/Volume adjustment etc.

3) WHEN EDITING TRACK INFORMATION YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO GO TO THE NEXT TRACK WITHOUT COMING OUT OF THE EDITOR (I.E. LIKE ITUNES).

4) Allow the now playing/queue section to be MINIMISED along with the my devices area.

5) Smart playists.

6)MOST IMPORTANTLY the average person (including me) does not want separate applications for music, videos and podcasts (maybe even pictures) COMBINE ALL OF THE APPLICATIONS TO MAKE IT MORE APPROACHABLE.

7) Thanks for adding support for the music store BUT WHY DOES IT STILL SHOW THE MUSIC PLAYER/ CURRENT DOWNLOADS BAR WHEN YOU ALREADY HAVE EXACTLY THE SAME THING IN THE APPLICATION, I know it can be minimised, but it should not be there in the first place.

BUT I love this application and there are many GREAT things about it (e.g. searching for track information is PERFECT). KEEP IT UP. THIS APP IS SERIOUS COMPETITION FOR ITUNES.

^Are you sure? Reviews say the E90 has MTP mode. And "Nokia Music should function with any MTP-compliant device, whether it be a Nokia device or another brand MP3 player."

If it still does not work, it's called beta for a reason. :P

I can import my itunes plus files on my pc (these are drm free but have a modified apple tag) and play these on the Nokia Music PC Application without any problem but when I try to transfer them to my phone 6120 classic S60 3rd FP1 I cannot play these files. I know there are workarounds etc but I want choice in how I play these files (and others from other music stores) and not have to spend time hacking/converting etc..Do any current or future Nokia phones support playback of these files? I can play these on my SE K800i without any problems! So either restrict files that cannot be played on the devices from being imported or improve support on the devices, one reason for sticking with an itunes/ipod setup for now..

it uses a lot of ram and it's slow.. taken a good 90 minutes/2 hours to scan my music. and it's now using 69% of CPU and 575Mb of ram (and climbing)

agree with netan above... I understand it's beta, but it needs a lot more work... actually I think it needs a lot less work. let us use our preferred applications more easily.

Is it true that the Nokia Music PC will embedd the album cover into the music files. If that's true then I will definitely switch over to Nokua Music PC and delete iTunes from my PC :)

I also hope that Nokia Music PC will find most of the album covers automatically

I just downloaded and started using the Nokia Music for PC application and I have to say I'm impressed.

After the imense trouble I had using Nokia Music Manager to do one very simple thing - move existing music from my PC to my N95 - I was expecting more of the same. But so far, so good.

The main thing I want to do with a piece of software is move music from my PC to my phone and this lets me do it very easily.

So far, it hasn't crashed on me but I'm still in the middle of importing my 19,750-track music library.

I just have two very minor suggestions at this point:
1. Letters with umlauts and other accents are not appearing correctly. For example, Bjork (with an umlaut over the 'o') appears as BjA?rk where A has a tilde over it and ? is the paragraph marker symbol. Beyonce (with an accent over the 'e') is BeyoncA? where A has the tilde over it and ? is the copyright symbol.
2. It would be nice to be able to continue to see the artist names after double-clicking on one to see the Albums.

Other than these two minor things, this is a great piece of software that I will be using as the default method of managing the music on my phone. Good job!

Hey Tomi,
Couple of points... Not sure if these have been raised or not...

- Media Keys - Should work when application is minimized
- Any way of integrating podcasting at all?
- It'd be cool if this could manage movies as well...
- M4A conversion would be cool
- Toolbar on the taskbar'd be cool as well

It's not bad but you could do alot more with it... just have a look at what Winamp offers...

Thanks for your comments - these suggestions are all being taken on board - if only we had the time for all of them! I have some specific replies for Russell.

The missing album artist detail is because we currently use the AlbumArtist metadata to represent an album - so where you have track artists but not album-artists, you'll see this apparent problem. It's something we're aware of and are looking at various solutions for.

As for playing an entire album from search results (or a drill-down view), you should be able to use the album art. Try double-clicking or using the right-click menu to "Play Now".

Please keep the comments coming!

Hi, is there anyway of giving the songs grades like in the iTunes ?
And also does nokia music pc have "smart playlists" like the iTunes so that you could have for example a playlist containing the songs with the highest grades.
If the Nokia Music PC has theese features plus that it gets album art and embedds it then I would definetely delete iTuner from my computer

PLEASE, PLEASE DO THE FOLLOWING:

1) THE SEACH BAR - it should search for artist/track/album in ONE COMBINED BAR. ALSO it should bring up possible tracks AS YOU ENTER INFORMATION.

2) ALBUM ART - It was easy to add album art to the album BUT I COULD NOT FIND OUT HOW TO ADD IT TO EACH INDIVIDUAL TRACK. You may be able to do this BUT it is not clear how to.

3) DEVICE SPECIFIC PICTURES - A great thing to do for NOKIA devices (I know that the application also caters for other devices) is to add a picture of your NOKIA DEVICE MODEL when you connect it. (e.g. I have an n82 and there should be a picture of an n82 displayed, when I connect it.) It would look like a far more polished application if you did this) I KNOW IT CAN BE DONE BECAUSE IT DOES THIS IN SOME OTHE APPLICATIONS SUCH AS THE SOFTWARE UPDATER.

4) THIS APPLICATION IS MADE BY NOKIA THEREFORE NOKIA EXPECTS YOU TO TRANSFER TRACKS TO YOUR NOKIA DEVICE.

You MUST make it so that you have a PHONE SECTION in which you can make/transfer playlists into. ALL of which sync to your Nokia device. This is because MOST PEOPLE CANNOT TRANSFER THEIR ENTIRE MUSIC COLLECTION TO THEIR PHONE. (Until all of us have devices like the n96 or when there are bigger memory cards). SO THAT WHEN YOU OPEN THE MUSIC APP IN YOUR PHONE, THERE IS NOT ONE PLAYLIST WHICH HAS ALL OF YOUR MUSIC IN. Also, in this phone section you should be able to set a size limit (in terms of megabytes).

5) YOU should be able to minimise AT LEAST ONE of either the "my devices" or the "now playing/queue" bars (or you could COMBINE THE TWO). So that you have MORE SPACE for the main music section (thus more space to display track information).

6) ONE APPLICATION for music and videos (maybe podcasts and photos too) should be created to make it easier to manage multimedia on your phone.

The BIGGEST PROBLEM IS THAT THIS APPLICATION IS TOO SLOW (at doing everything - navigating and transfering music to my n82). Please make it run faster. Thank you Nokia because despite the above this is still a great application.

I have downloaded the latest version today. About 2.5 hours into the experience I can't say I am over impressed.

On a Vista machine I am trying to import about 30GB of music from a networked hard drive and so far I have done about 50% of it, I've seen glaciers moving quicker.

On the XP machine the application is still being installed after about 0.5 hours.

Now it is all working fine and pretty good with the phone but....

Why if I select a single track, albumn or playlist does the player insist on playing it repeatedly rather than stopping at the end of track, albumn or list? I can't seem to find an option to turn off the "repeat". Quite annoying.

ON THE LEFT HAND SIDE IT DOESNT SEEM TO BE FINDING MY PHONE?? SO I ONLY HAVE OPTION FOR CD OR PC??? NO PHONE :(

Will it/does it recognise music folders on my PC and copy whole folders ?

Also, I'm with Chris, above: I have all of my music in K:\iTunes. But that's not a problem for me - I'm only importing (Menu->File->Import Music) the albums that I want to transfer to my N95.

One thing that was strange, though: I imported an album and the artwork was there. I right-clicked the album and selected "Edit Album details...", copied the album artist details from the Artist field, closed the dialog box and then double-clicked on the album. Artwork gone! And Menu->Edit->Get Album Artwork is greyed out.

So it seems you can have either the album artwork with the "Unknown artist" label or the name of the artist and no artwork!

And one more thing (for now): the link to online support in Help->Troubleshooting and Support is broken. Looks like it's trying to go to http://www.music.nokia.com/support.

I transferred the DRM'd music which came along with the N73 Music Edition to the PC using this software. But those music is NOT playing on the PC with this software.

Please help solve this problem. Also, I second the Proxy support request.

repiaing tips

bit late the nokia music application party, but installed the music manager 3 hours ago.

Currently it's importing my music collection (52gb) - it's about 80% done, it's been importing for 3 hours.

according to task manager, it's using 1007Mb of Ram and 51% of cpu.

I think it might have a memory leak?

???????? ????! ???? ?????????? ????? ??????? ????? - ??? ???? :)

????????????? ?????????, ? ?? ??? ?? ????.

At long last welcome to the real world of music management Nokia. This is much more user friendly although it is still not as versatile as managers such as Media Monkey and i-tunes, also downloads are more expensive that Amazon. Limitations include: Transferring artwork is still a problem, whilst the songs transfer like a dream, my N95 still doesn't pick up all the playlists. Also I have not noticed any smart playlist or synchronisation functionality. However, a big step forward! Thank you.

Nokia Music Store PC Application doesn't work on Windows Vista with an Xpress Music phone and a Comes With Music voucher. I bought the 5310 Xpress Music for my girlfriend for Christmas and here we are one month later and it still doesn't work.
In theroy, this is no longer a Beta so it is really disappointing that we can't get one of our best selling phones to work with the new and soon to be dominant operating system.
I have spent over 5 hours on the phone to Nokia Care and they can't help. They told me that 'most of the time - this phone doesn't work with Vista'. And then their advice was to return it to the shop and buy another one (what - like an iPhone maybe?).
This week when I phoned again they told me to download the patch. Which I did. But the itself patch doesn't work on Vista!!!
Wow! This is hard work. I want my money back now please...