Mobile Music - Success (Part 2)
Last Saturday we looked at simply using Windows Explorer to organize and put music on your S60 device. This week is a bit more organized, moving on to Winamp. Winamp has been around for a long, long time, and was the 2nd mp3 playing application I used on the PC. I started with Musicmatch, and was disgusted at how memory-hungry it was. Winamp used to be a much more thin client, and has added some weight, but still manages to be pretty good, in my opinion.
Recently they added the Media Library functionality, and along with it, the ability to sync with portable media players. You can also create "smart playlists" and they now have access to all kinds of streaming media. There’s several all-Family Guy, all the time streams. Amazing. So anyways, I decided I’d give Winamp a shot. Winamp was a vast improvement over simple drag-and-drop functionality, and offers several benefits.
The first is watch folders. Watch folders means that if I go through
and move stuff around and rename it and whatnot, Winamp will
periodically scan those folders and see what I changed, and fix any
links that need to be made, and update those files in my Media Library.
That’s really cool.
The second was the ability to sync portable devices. Basically I could
connect my N73 via data cable, set it to show as a portable hard drive,
and Winamp would automatically "autofill" it to a certain percentage of
"full" with a random assortment of music. Sounds great, right?
It was until Winamp started finding the N73 via bluetooth, as well. It
would constantly give me errors, and it caused problems because it was
always trying to load up songs via bluetooth, which I didn’t want, and
there was no way (that I could find) to stop it. It also detected both
the Phone Memory and External Memory, and was simply all around a
disaster.
I don’t recommend using Winamp to organize/synchronize music on your
S60 device. It was nothing but headaches for me, and did not last long.
I still have Winamp installed on my system, but mostly for video
playback and streaming TV. Next week I’ll cover using Nokia’s Music
Manager application (found within PC Suite) to organize and synchronize
music on your S60 device.
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