Mobile Music - Success Part 1
Part of the original PC-Free experiment was an acknowledgment that I would be using my PC as a media repository. There’s just no way that either my N73 or my N800 could hold all my media, including pictures, music, and videos. So I had to use something on my PC to organize my music. There’s TONS of options for this, and I’ve tried 4: simply using Windows Explorer, Winamp, Nokia Music Manager, and iTunes (yes, iTunes). All have benefits and drawbacks, and all will be outlined here.
The first thing I tried (or rather simply used to use) was Windows
Explorer. I’m very anal about how my music is organized. I don’t
understand why people have massive digital media collections and yet
still treat them like a physical media collection, organized by album.
Who cares what album it’s on? If I want to listen to Counting Crows, I
want to just dump all their music in one playlist and hit random. So I
have my music organized in folders, starting with Genre. Within each
Genre folder, I have the Artist folder (the artist only gets their own
folder if I have more than 10-15 songs. If not, they’re just dumped in
the "Other" folder). Within the Artist folder, there is no
organization. I have no need for album art or album folders.
Thus, using Drag-and-Drop to put my music on my mobile devices was
originally the best way to do it. It was easy, I could do it without
having to load up a whole program, and I could easily choose the media
I wanted. The problem, however, is the same thing that people with
large (I have 4,500 songs, and while I know it’s dwarfed by most, it’s
still alot, when you think about it) libraries have: listening to
everything. With my library, according to iTunes, I could listen to
music for 14 days continuously and not repeat a single song. That’s
ridiculous.
The other problem is refreshing it on the device. Every time I connect
my phone, I’d have to open the drive, navigate to my Music folder, then
open the My Music folder on my PC and pick what to transfer, and drag
and drop. Pretty annoying.
There really weren’t very many benefits of this method, other than pure
simplicity and not having to use a program to organize everything.
Stay tuned next Saturday to read about using Winamp to organize music on your S60 device.
I’ve used various methods of doing this. Winamp has the advantage of being able to transcode to AAC+, and works fine if your phone goes “mass storage” mode. I’ve also used iTunes, via “itunes agent”, and while this is handy, the Nokia’s don’t like the way iTunes tags MP4/M4A files, so won’t display the tags in your music player. I also tried the … *shiver* Nokia Music Manager. Winamp won.