With the discovery of MediaMonkey, we are now closer than ever to having S60 be capable of a true, fully synchronized desktop/mobile music experience, rather than simply fully synchronized desktop/mobile music content. Unfortunately, it is the S60 music player that is holding up the party, now, as it is lacking a few crucial elements of a great music experience.
Thus, I need a new music player application for my S60 phones. It needs to have a few specific features, which I’ll list out, and explain, below. I’m taking suggestions, and will give the top few suggestions a try, with a full review posted for others to enjoy.
I need an S60 music player that is able to properly manage a frequently-changing music library. Now that I can sync easily, I’m going to, and I need to not have to waste time, battery life, and resources by ‘refreshing my music library’. With ~1200+ tracks being synced over, it can take over an hour to refresh all of those, and that’s simply unacceptable. S40 doesn’t do it, Windows Mobile doesn’t do it, the iPhone doesn’t do it, and neither should S60, period. I need a music player that can ‘watch’ a specific folder on my memory card, and update itself accordingly.
I need an S60 music player that records playcounts. The autoplaylists that I generate in MediaMonkey, and sync to my phone, are full of tracks that I have not listened to in the past 30 days. The default S60 music player does not synchronize playcounts back to the desktop, so if I listen to half of the tracks on my phone one day, when I sync, MediaMonkey is not told that I played those tracks. This cannot be that difficult to implement, and it is definitely a crucial element in offering me a complete desktop/mobile music experience.
I need an S60 music player that records ratings. This is actually tricky, because I don’t use ratings like most people. When I had an iPod, and used iTunes, I would give a track a rating of either none, 3, or 5. The 5 rating, oddly, was used to denote tracks that I did not like, for whatever reason, and wanted to delete from my computer. I gave them a 5-star rating simply because, on the iPod, it is the easiest one to apply. I could drive around, rating songs for a few days, and then once I synced, I would sort my music library by star rating on my computer, and I knew that the ones at the top of the list (the 5-stars) were ones that I wanted to delete. An easy way to prune my library. The 3 was for tracks that I specifically liked, more so than others. The none, obviously, was simply tracks that I neither especially liked or disliked. This system could be implemented in any way that has 3 ratings (yes, no, neutral, for instance), though since MediaMonkey supports a 5-star rating, I would be satisfied if I could find an S60 music player that simply records a star rating to the track, and sync’s that information back to my computer.
I need an S60 music player that scrobbles to Last.FM. I currently use Mobbler, but I don’t think it has the ability to tie in with players other than the default S60 music player. Thus, I need an application that allows me to send my music history to Last.FM easily. It does not need to allow me to stream Last.FM, as I still have Mobbler for that.
Those are really the only requirements that I have for a new S60 music player. I would really like for it to support any dedicated music playback buttons that happen to be on my phone, though since I’m using either the N79 or the E71 lately, this is less of a requirement.
What do you think? Am I being unreasonable? Do you know of any applications that fulfill all of these requirements? Given that I used my iPod over 5 years ago, with these features, I would have expected S60 to support these features by now, but alas, the music player, like the podcasting client, has received little to no attention since S60 3rd Edition, even though we’ve seen 2 feature packs and a full platform update.
