N82 Tips: Getting The Most Out Of Your Music Player

I got an email just the other day from a reader named Alec that wanted to share with all of you a huge guide he wrote about "Getting The Most Out Of Your Music Player". It's a great article for those who love to use their N82 as a dedicated mp3 player like myself.

In this guide Alec will show you how to manage volume settings, tags, music conversion, playlists, and trouble shooting on your Nokia N82. Of course this guide works for any Nseries (and Eseries) device including the N81, N95, and E71.

Keep reading to learn how to take full advantage of your music player...

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting my brand new, shiny N82, I was excited to finally be able to load all of my music onto my phone (with a relatively inexpensive 8GB microSDHC card).

The only problem was that there was little to no documentation on the best way to do this and, unfortunately, I've faced endless amounts of googling and forum trawling before getting my phone set up just how I want for music, so I thought I'd write a guide.

This guide assumes that your phone is attached in "mass storage" mode throughout. It's possible to do this process connected as a media player and syncing it with a media player, but I prefer the flexibility offered by mass storage mode. It's a personal thing, though, and not all things in the guide require mass store mode connection.

Optional
If, like me, you're too lazy to continually change the volume of your music, you may want to consider normalising it, which cannot be done once it's in m4a format (as far as I'm aware). If you want to do this, you'll have to normalise it before you convert. A great tool to use is MP3Gain, which allows you to normalise your entire library with a single number of clicks, or you can normalise them within folders to maintain relative volume (ie on an album, to preserve dynamic range). I won't go into too much detail, as there are already plenty of tutorials on MP3Gain already (Google it).

Music Conversion
The great thing about the N82 (as well as the N95 and all similar phones) is the support for eAAC+ (or AAC-HEv2), which is a form of compression for music, which can dramatically reduce the size of your library, with less compromise over quality than with MP3.

Of course, everyone's ear for music quality is different and some audiophiles might shudder at the idea of using such lossy formats, but I've found bitrates as low as ~32kpbs to be "fair" quality, especially since I wanted to save space on my memory card for maps, photos and videos. Before you convert your entire music collection, I'd recommend playing around with your settings first on a single audio file and comparing different bit rates to decide between quality and compression.

For the conversion process, I used dBpowerAmp with the Nero AAC Codec. To get this working properly, you'll have to move the downloaded files into:

C:\Program Files\Illustrate\dBpowerAmp\encoder\

or wherever you installed dBpowerAmp.
There are alternatives, like WinAmp, but I've no experience with the program.

I opened up dBpowerAmp Batch Converter and selected my music folder. Hitting "convert". This brings up the settings window.

Hit the "Converting to:" dropdown and select "m4a Nero (AAC)". The bit rate settings are up to you, but I chose VBR at quality ".15" (~32kbps). If you want better quality, go for ".25" (~64kbps). I've read that a good bitrate to use is around 48kbps, so if you want this sort of quality, hit the ABR radio button and adjust the slider accordingly.

On the "Encoder>>" button, you may want to check that the program has located your Nero AAC codec. If not, you should point it to where it is with "Locate Encoder". Then, from the drop-down menu next to the "Encoder>>" button, select "Force HE v2" to use the eAAC+ encoding (which it should do automatically at low bitrates, but we just want to be sure).

Finally, select your output folder, hit convert and you're away!

To give you some idea of numbers, when my collection was in MP3 format, it occupied 16.10GB (at 8days, 10hrs running time). In .15 quality eAAC+, the whole thing fit in 3.2GB.
The conversion process was a lengthy one, which ran for about 20hrs, so make sure you get your settings right first time.

Tags
The built in S60 music player is very nice and, in a couple of ways, superior to an iPod. The music player deals with tags, album art and m3u playlists. Not to mention I now couldn't imagine living without the ability to just type in a search and have the results pop right up.

Thankfully, dBpowerAmp preserves your MP3 tags when it converts to m4a. However, it loses any ratings you may have given your library, which, in a library of over 3000 songs, is a royal pain in the arse. I did find a (complex) solution, but I shan't post that unless requested.

If you do need to adjust your tags after conversion, don't rely on Windows Media Player (though I'm sure you've all left this program for some time) or, surprisingly, MediaMonkey (which doesn't seem to read my m4a tags properly - I never found a solution). Other solutions include, again, WinAmp, the context menu that comes with dBpowerAmp, or what I used: MP3Tag, which reads and writes the tags perfectly and can even query freedb and amazon.com for tags and cover art (though not as easily as mediamonkey). However, I'd definitely recommend getting your tags sorted before you convert, so that you can use tools like MediaMonkey.

Playlists
The music player supports m3u playlists, which is great. You can import your m4a library into your favourite music manager (in this case, I did use MediaMonkey, because you can view a library on a particular device and also because of its playlist management). Build a playlist from your tracks and then export this as an m3u playlist. You can export dynamic playlists as m3u, but I haven't yet found a way of adding custom dynamic playlists to the phone besides the 3 preloaded ones.

Save the playlist in the root of your memory card.

You might want to check the playlist in a document-viewer, like MS Word (or even just wordpad) to see that all the paths are relative (ie, they are not preceded with a drive letter), so that the playlist works properly on your phone. If there is a drive letter, it's a simple case of "Find & Replace", where you find "F:\" and replace with "".

Troubleshooting
In order to get all your music and playlists to show up properly in your library, you'll have to refresh it. This is done by opening:

Music Player -> Options -> Refresh

This will take a (long) while depending on how much music you've crammed onto your phone, so just leave it to do its thing and it'll beep at you when it's done.

Important: If you delete a file off your memory card, you'll have to delete it within the library also, or you won't be able to refresh.

A great tip I also found is that if your library isn't refreshing, you can delete your library and rebuild it. Just delete these files:

e:\private\101FFC31\mpxv1.mpd
e:\private\101FFC31\pcv5.mpd
e:\private\101ffca9\harvesterdb.dat

You'll have to refresh your library again.

Finally
Hit play.

-----------------------------------

Thanks Alec for sharing this great tutorial.

Continue Reading...

Mobbler + N82 = Last.fm On The Go, And It's Free!

Ok I'll be honest. I've heard plenty about Last.fm but I never gave it a try. I always use Pandora.com for all my internet radio streaming needs when I'm at my computer. I've always wanted a solution to Pandora on my N82 but have never got it. Today I saw this post over at Symbian In Motion and decided to give both Last.fm and this new S60 Last.fm scrobbler application called Mobbler a try. Wow am I impressed.





I've been using Last.fm all day now informing it of all the music I like and it has already came up with tons of more bands/artists that suit my tastes. When I launch Mobbler from my N82 and sign into my Last.fm account I get only streaming music that is related to my tastes. Or say I go out on a limb and feel like hearing some hip-hop (which I don't listen to often) it will find random hip hop artists that relate to the artist I typed in.

In order to use Mobbler you must have a Last.fm account. When you launch the application you will need to first login. Then hit Options > Start A New Station and you can go by artist, tag (genre), user, personal, recommended, & loved tracks. If you first learn Last.fm on the computer you will better understand how it works.

Also, if you leave Mobbler running in the background and you play tracks already on your phone from your music player the application will learn the music you like and apply it to your account for future internet radio streaming on your Last.fm account.

Here is how the developer describes Mobbler...

Mobbler, Mobile Scrobbler, is a last.fm radio player and scrobbler for Nokia S60 3rd edition smartphones. It allows you to listen to your last.fm radio stations and to scrobble tracks played using the Nokia S60 Music Player. Music player scrobbling can be done both whilst you listen, or queued offline to be submitted later.

And how it works from their Wiki page...

A track will be scrobbled if you listen to more than either 50% or 4 minutes of it in one go, whichever comes first. The track must also be over 30 seconds long.

If you restart your phone you will also have to restart mobbler to continue scrobbling. It would be nice if mobbler was a startup application, but it is not possible at this time.

A track will be sent to last.fm as 'now playing' only once per listen. If you pause and restart a track it will not resend to last.fm.

If your mobile phone loses it's data connection, mobbler will queue the tracks you listen to. When the data connection becomes active again, mobbler will automatically reconnect and scrobble all the queued tracks in one go.

If you close mobbler without scrobbling the tracks you listened to in that session it will still remember them and scrobble them the next time you open mobbler and connect to last.fm.

The status bar at the top of mobbler will tell you what state mobbler is in. If you are connected and everything is ok, it will tell you how many tracks it has successfully scrobbled so far. If you are not connected, it will tell you how many tracks have been queued and are awaiting submission the next time you connect. If there is a problem with mobbler, it will also tell you there.

If you scrobble tracks using another client before scrobbling tracks queued in mobbler, last.fm may ignore the tracks from mobbler due their spam protection filter. It would be best to scrobble any queued tracks from mobbler before using any other last.fm client.

Right now I can't get it to stream good over an Edge connection. I'm sure with 3g or Wifi it works a lot better. Maybe it's the building I'm in. The application is still farely new and in beta stage so you might find some kinks.

Keep in mind this application uses all data for streaming. It needs a constant data connection, so if you don't have an unlimited data plan be extremely careful.

Click here to download Mobbler and start streaming Last.fm to your Nokia N82 today.

Let me know what you guys think. Do you like it better than Nokia Internet Radio?

Continue Reading...

Your N82 And Music - Enhance Your Experience With These Tips

Besides my huge and annoying coffee buzz I have right now (got the shakes and everything) I just remembered that I've been meaning to show you guys a great article about music and the Nokia N82. One of my favorite bloggers Rita El Khoury, who's always keeping me in check ;), from Symbian-Guru is impressed with her new N82 that she won and came up with some great tips to enhance your music experience with your camera-oriented smartphone.

She goes through a few things that I often overlook including quick access to your music and different ways to control your music. Click here to see the article and leave your comments.

Oh and she also wrote up this article about re-configuring the keys on your Nokia N82 using the MagicKeys application. Another great read.

I'm kind of curious to see how many people use their N82's on a daily basis for music. I listen to mp3's just about everyday. I no longer have the need to carry around any ipod.

Stay tuned tomorrow for some new themes and the N82 at the Car Show.

Continue Reading...

Freeware: Symella Peer To Peer Downloading Client

Yesterday I was checking out Thoughts On S60, a blog by Howard Forums fame JonnyBruha. He reminded me of a great application I haven't used in awhile called Symella. It's a peer to peer application used to download files from others who are connected to the network, works similar to Limewire (minus the virus's as Jonny mentions) or Soulseek if your familiar with those programs.



Symella runs surprisingly well on the N82, although it doesn't render right when the phone is in landscape. Just make sure your holding the phone in portrait when using this application.

Here's a description by the developer:

Symella is a basic Gnutella client for mobile devices based on the S60 platform. It is capable of searching and downloading, but do not upload any data in its current release. It supports multi-threaded downloads which means that if multiple users have a particular file then Symella can download the file from several locations simultenously.

I usually don't support free music downloading but once in awhile theres just a track that you have to hear. This makes it easy on your N82. The speeds are decent even over edge. Yesterday I downloaded a 5mb track in about 8-9 minutes here in the States.

Click here to check out JonnyBruha's thoughts on this and a torrent application.

Click here to go straight to the Symella download page.

Continue Reading...

No Music Keys On The N82 - Where Would You Have Put Them?

My friend Devin from The Nokia Guide has asked us a genuine question.

"What do you think is the best way of implementing media keys on a Candybar design like the N82?"

It's a bummer that no dedicated music keys were included on the Nokia N82, but they are something I can live without. Most of the time I'm listening to music with a bluetooth headset or with the headphones that came with the N82. Most bluetooth headsets have dedicated music keys, as do the N82's headphone adaptor Nokia Music Headset HS-45, AD-54. But it would still be nice to have dedicated music keys on the phone for listening through the stereo speakers, right?

Devin mentions that one solution would be to have a slide out design for just the media keys, similar to the top slider of the N95. But many like myself would not welcome this idea. One of the sole reasons we love the N82 is because it's one solid piece with no moving parts. He does have a few other good ideas worth checking out.

Here's my idea I posted at his blog:

"I would love to have it like this...
Hold down the up volume key 2 seconds for next track, the down for previous track.
Hold down the gallery button 2 seconds to play/pause. it already looks like a play button. Have these keys only active when the music player is active."

Who knows? Maybe this can be done with a 3rd party application. This solution would solve the problem of having more buttons, killing two birds with one stone.

What are your thoughts? Would you have liked to see dedicated media keys on the N82? Click here to read Devin's article where this topic is discussed more in depth and be sure to leave him your thoughts.

Continue Reading...

Freeware: Nokia Internet Radio Application For Your Nokia N82

The Nokia Internet Radio program has become one of the most used programs on my N82. You have literally hundreds of radio stations to choose from streaming from all over the world.

Even over an Edge connection the application buffers maybe once every half an hour for about 10 seconds. Not too bad considering the N82's lack of 3g here in the States. Loading up a station on my Edge connection usually takes around 10 seconds.

Nokia Internet Radio works perfectly over wired or bluetooth headsets, and great through the loudspeakers as well.

A few more features of this free application...

• Choose from a large variety of stations and shows, including news, sporting events and music.
  
• Browse for your favorite radio programs by genre, language, or country, or search by station name.
  
• Explore the most popular stations and stay in touch with the mobile internet radio community.
  
• Nokia Internet Radio service is supported by both packet data and WLAN connections.
• Save stations to your favorites for easy access.

With all the available memory that the N82 comes with you should have no problem listening to music, browsing the web, checking emails, and taking photos all at the same time. Use it to its full advantage. Of course holding down the menu key with the built-in task manager or your favorite 3rd party task manager will be necessary for multi-tasking.

Like mentioned earlier this can be used over WLAN. If your using this over your carrier data connection make sure you have an unlimited data plan or your gonna be hurtin next time your bill comes.

Click here to go to the download page at Nokia.com.

Continue Reading...

Photos: Capturing A Favorite Local Band With The Nokia N82

Saturday night was a great night for me. I got a chance to go see one of my favorite local hardcore/metal bands called Taken. These guys were around for awhile, and I went through my second half of highschool seeing them month after month. Keep in mind I'm 23 years old. Taken broke up a few years ago and it was a huge bummer for their loyal fan base. A few months ago they announced a reunion show, and I had to make it.

This would also be the first time I got a chance to use the Nokia N82 to a concert. I know I promised you guys Foo Fighters pictures from when I saw them last Thursday (which was amazing), but the seats I had were too far up and not facing the stage making the N82 useless. Too bad it doesn't have optical zoom. I got about 20 shots of Taken playing on Saturday and a good handful of the other band that played as well. Before you scroll down and look at the slideshow I'm gonna describe the nature and atmosphere of the show. Emotions were high, kids were rocking out everwhere jumping around everywhere stage diving and mosh pitting. I was hanging onto my N82 for dear life. The air was muggy and moist and the lighting was dark with occacional bursts from the strobe lights. Because of the random lighting the N82 sometimes blurred the photo. I personally like the effects the lightning gave to some of the photos.

I uploaded these to OVI Share, which is Nokia's version of Flickr. If you want to see a picture bigger simply click on it during the slideshow and it will take you to the Ovi website where all the images are located. Check out the slideshow below, there are about 20 photos.



Some of the pictures may not look like it but the Xenon flash proved to be a huge help. Without the flash the N82 gives off, a lot of these pictures would be extremely grainy and dull. The camera performed well especially under these lighting conditions. My hand was always up in the air being shaken around when I took these. It was crowded and the crowd was moving. In some of these shots I thought I was gonna get trampled by flying bodies.

In the past I would use a 5 megapixel Samsung digital camera to get these shots. The photos came out just as good, some maybe better. The N82 out performed the digital camera in a few ways. For one the digital took forever to take the show once I push the shutter down. Then when it was finally captured it took almost 20 seconds sometimes to process the image. I think the digital camera didn't like the lighting of the room. The N82 on the other hand was extremely fast. The shutter would go off and the camera would be ready for the next shot in five seconds. I turned off the "show captured image" setting since I need to save battery life. Thats another thing the Samsung camera sucked at - battery life. With it struggling to get these shots and process them, the battery would be dead in a half hour.

And now for the video. This is where the Nokia N82 failed. It got some great video footage and the quality is acceptable, even with the lack of a light. But one thing killed it - the audio. Of course this is harsh to critisize because it's such a loud environment in a room about the size of a large living room, but a regular digital camera or camcorder would have got me much better sound. The N82 with it's 30 frames per second video recorder should have came with a much better microphone. Everything in the videos I took just sound way too high pitched, you can't make anything out - at all. 100 percent unusable. Next time I decide to record a video of live music in a small room up close to the speakers I'm gonna bring a stand alone sound recorder and just keep it in my pocket. I've seen some concert footage with the N82 before and the sound was good. But thats because the phone wasn't up close to the band and speakers. I was at any given time between 1 foot and 10 feet from the speakers. I may end up overlaying the real cd audio tracks from a song on top of the video footage I got. I should be able to match it up pretty well.

While I got all this footage, it's amazing that the N82 had an extremely low battery. I wrote yesterday about how I handled the problem, click here if your interested in reading this.

What do you think of the photos? Of course I should brighten up some of them with Ovi's editing tool. I may post some retouched samples tomorrow. If you have any shots of live music email them over to me so I can check em out and show them off here at the blog.

Continue Reading...

Syntrax: New Free S60 Application For Musicians & Song Writers

Band members and music writers rejoice - You now have a handy music application to install on your Nokia N82. Syntrax for S60 comes with a sequencer, sound synthesis and sample editor all wrapped up in a nice little package. I personally haven't tried this out yet, but plan on giving it a shot sometime this week.

Features:

• Up to 8 stereo audio channels simultaneously (previously only 6)
  
• Playback of samples with bi-directional looping support
  
• Realtime sound synthesis with 15 sound generation effects
  
• Realtime effects like filters, morphs and echoes
  
• A built in small sample editor
  
• A full featured sequencer
  
• Dynamic playback options (songspeed, groove, muting etc..)
  
• Realtime instrument parameter changing
  
• Full library of preset songs and sounds for you to start working with
  
• User adjustable sound quality for slower devices
  
• MIDI compatibility.

If your into writing music and would love to use the Nokia N82 help you while your away from the practice studio, check out Syntrax and leave your comment below to let us know how it goes.

Click here to download Syntrax for S60 and the Nokia N82.

Continue Reading...