Guest writer: Mark Wheatley, Product Manager, Nokia Music for PC

Well, we are now at version 1.0.

I would like to thank all of you for your incredibly constructive comments over the last few months. Lots of your ideas are now in our product backlog and you will start seeing some of them appear over the next few months. Also, the bug reports posted on Beta Labs have helped us identify and fix lots of issues that are harder to find in our more ‘clinical’ system testing environments.

Those amongst you who have not previously installed the Beta application can download the first full version of Nokia Music from this link:

http://music.nokia.com/download

If you have already installed the Beta you will be receiving an automatic update to version 1.0 during the coming week.

Those of you in the United Kingdom you will soon be able to experience Nokia Music as part of the great ‘Comes With Music’ concept that launches in the next few weeks. If you buy a ‘Comes With Music’ device you will be able to download all the music you want from the Nokia Music Store for a whole year. And unlike some other subscription deals you get to keep the music after the year is over.

Thank you all again for helping us through Nokia Music’s infancy. The fully grown Nokia Music experience is finally here.

Mark Wheatley,
Product Manager,
Nokia Music

Quick note: Nokia Music PC Client has just been updated. Once again, loads of improvements done. While I don’t have a detailed changelog to publish (sorry), a couple of things that previously bugged be are now gone.

Download here.

More important, as always, please share your thoughts about how you think we could make it even better: drop a comment to this blog post, or take the survey!

Quick note: now that you have had time to play with the updated Nokia Music PC client, could you do Mark and his R&D friends a favor, and fill in the survey?

It’s short and simple - same questions as the last time.

Thanks in advance!!

Ps. is there something we could offer as a collective incentive? I mean, something like “If there are more than 250 valid responses during the next week, Tommi promises to …”

Guest writer: Mark Wheatley, Product Manager, Nokia Music for PC

Hi, and welcome to the next version of Nokia Music.

First of all I would just like to thank all those people who have posted comments, defect reports and suggestions relating to the old Beta. This has been an incredibly useful exercise for us here at Nokia Music. Thanks to the contributions of those on this forum we have been able to identify and fix over one hundred defects in this new version. Things we have been able to solve include a large number of ‘stability’ type defects, the ‘Unknown Artist’ bug, as well as a number of issues around device connection.

Unfortunately a bug in the older Beta means Vista users will have to manually remove the previous version using ‘Add/Remove programs’ before installing the new version.

Functional changes since the previous version include a new ‘lighter’ colour scheme and support for ripping to AAC/AAC+/eAAC+ format.

The supported devices list has also been extended to include the following devices: N76, N78, N81, N82, N91, N95, N95 8GB, N96, 5220, 5310, 5320, 5610, 6210, 6220, E66, E71.

Please keep the comments and feature suggestions coming. A lot of your suggestions have already made it onto our wish-list for the future.

We will release the next Beta update sometime after 28th July. The Music Store integration will be activated some time after this.

Best wishes, and thanks again,

Mark Wheatley

Guest writer: Mark Wheatley, Product Manager, Nokia Music for PC

Welcome to Nokia Music!

Thanks checking out this Beta version of our new Nokia Music PC application.

While there is other music management software out there, we’ve made this application more focused on the needs of mobile users. That is why our first release concentrates on those features that will give real value to people who enjoy their music on the move.

We talked to many users during the product development phase and they told us they want to update the music on their mobile device more frequently than they do at the moment. Many of them find the process time consuming and difficult. We created Nokia Music with that in the forefront of our minds and made it possible to rip CDs directly to a connected device (just drag and drop the CD icon to your device – job done!) and move playlists you have created while out and about back to your PC collection.

The techies among us will be interested to know that Nokia Music is one of the first applications to take use Microsoft’s new WPF technology which in the future will allow us to introduce some cool and innovative enhancements in the coming months.

It was also important to us when creating Nokia Music to take a standards based approach. What does that mean? Well, we have not created any proprietary connection protocols or metadata models. This means that Nokia Music should function with any MTP-compliant device, whether it be a Nokia device or another brand MP3 player.

When you open Nokia Music, it will be hard to miss the ‘Store’ tab at the top. We’ve started rolling out Nokia Music Stores in many countries around the world and when a Store is launched in your country, you will see various new features being enabled that enhance the Nokia Music experience further. Things such as artwork retrieval and a recommendations feature. Unfortunately, this Beta version doesn’t support the Music Store features yet.

As this is a Beta release, there are a few issues still to be resolved as well as some performance improvements we would like to make. In the meantime, thank you for trying Nokia Music and please post as many comments and suggestions as you have time to make. I am especially interested to hear the what of features you would like to see introduced in future versions.

Thanks again for your time,

Mark Wheatley
Product Manager, Nokia Music for PC