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Nokia Music PC Client Is Now Ovi Player

By The Guru on November 13, 2009

If you’ve been looking for a way to play all those Ovies that you have laying around, look no further – Nokia has released the first version of Ovi Player! Ok, ok, so it’s really just the Nokia Music PC Client, renamed, Ovi Player is indeed now available, with a few new features and bug fixes.

Ovi-Player-Overlay-controls-in-Library2-1024x642Ovi Player is Nokia’s desktop music software, supposedly awesome for managing your local music library and transferring tracks between your computer and your Symbian-powered smartphone. Today’s update includes a few new views that should make it easier to browse your music, as well as smaller player controls, for a more compact look. The volume and track position sliders have also been tweaked to be more responsive, which should be helpful. Ovi Player is also fully compatible with Windows 7, so you shouldn’t need any installation tricks to get it up and running. Also, in the comments, Mark reveals that there will be a Mac version available in 2010.

Unfortunately, Ovi Player isn’t a solution, and the reason is clear – it is being designed as a sporadic-use-tool, rather than a music management solution. This is obvious by the massive amount of resources still required to run this behemoth, as well as the lack of key features such as ratings and playcounts.

That first point is the real kicker, though. Look at the major music management apps for the desktop – iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, MediaMonkey. All of them are designed to take total control of your media playback, and all are lightweight enough to have running constantly in the background on even the most basic entry-level computers. Ovi Player, and all of its previous iterations, on the other hand, suck down RAM and CPU cycles like it’s going out of style. It’s simply not something the normal user can legitimately leave running in the background all the time, and until it’s lightweight enough to do so, will have limited uptake.

This ability to run in the background is essential to really be able to properly manage my music experience. It facilitates the merging of my desktop and mobile music experience, and would allow Nokia to be a part of  every step of my music experience, rather than just the phone one.

In addition to the resource issue, Ovi Player still doesn’t offer much in terms of advanced features. It doesn’t synchronize ratings between itself and your phone, nor does it store playcounts or tag the music with a last played date. I’ve discussed this at length with team lead Mark Wheatley, and while he agrees, it seems the team’s focus is elsewhere.

I don’t know the real push behind the Ovi Player, obviously, but as long as it remains as resource-intensive as it has been, it’s a total fail for me. When I boot up my computer, I launch Firefox, Seesmic Desktop, Digsby, and my music player (currently MediaMonkey). I simply can’t do this with Ovi Player without completely dragging my computer to a halt, regardless of the hardware.

You can download Ovi Player here, if you’re interested.

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The Guru

The Guru, aka Ricky Cadden, started Symbian-Guru.com in November 2006, out of his excitement for the S60 3rd Edition version of Symella. The Guru has used Symbian devices since the Nokia 6620, and is known for his perspective as a power user. You can follow The Guru on Twitter at @Rcadden

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  • blip

    I tried this out, and yes, it takes too many resources to be useful.

  • http://blog.obsidial.com Craig

    Know what else would be nice Nokia? merge the podcast app and the music player in such a way that you can subscribe to podcasts thru Ovi Music, or from the device and everything syncs like it’s supposed to…and while you’re at it…just drop the music store, adopt Amazon’s…and make the media app (on phone and PC) manage videos too…even buy them from Amazon too..

    it’s 2009…it’s no longer just enough to be able to PLAY music on the device…

  • Lloyd

    I find this new version better on resources than Nokia Music. It takes less time to open and isn’t as taxing on my system when running in the background. That’s the good news.

    The bad news? It wouldn’t connect to the Nokia Music Store (I use the UK’s) though everything else worked fine.

    How did I fix it? This is the first time I’ve actually found the Nokia discussion board had an answer that worked. I had to delete the MDataStore.db3 file from the previous version of Nokia Music found in C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Nokia\Nokia Data Store\DataBase.

    I would think Nokia….no wait….I would hope Nokia would’ve ensured that the file would have been deleted as part of the update process. As soon as I deleted it and restarted my PC I was able to choose my Nokia Music Store location with no problem.

  • Viipottaja

    I would venture a guess that the change in name to “player” implies that some other content than music only will become available through the Music (err.. Playa? :) ) Store. If not, I would hope they would have just name it Ovi Music. But who knows.

    ps. Ricky, even if you don’t like something, can you pleeeeeease stop using “fail” so much. ;)

  • http://www.symbian-guru.com TheGuru

    I only used the word ‘fail’ once in this post. :) I don’t think Ovi Player is a complete fail. I mean, obviously it works if you need to transfer tracks and create playlists and whatnot.

    What it sucks at is helping Nokia to own your music experience, like they should. I don’t own a dedicated MP3 player – all of my mobile music experiences are had on a Nokia phone (or other phone if I’m reviewing something). And yet, after all the work that has gone into the Ovi Player (and I’ve had the chance to chat in person with Mark Wheatley – LOTS of work has gone into this application), it’s still nowhere near a real solution for me. At least not to the extent that Winamp or MediaMonkey have been, and certainly not to the extent that WMP or iTunes is for most people.

    I think your guess is likely spot-on, though, for the record.

  • Viipottaja

    I certainly see your point, and hope that eventually the functionality you are missing will be a part of it. I for one never really bother rating my songs etc. so some of that stuff is not important to me at all. I do wish the Music Store would open in the US, but find it unlikely to happen anytime soon as Nokia has such miniscule market share here right now – that may start to very slowly change over the next 24 months…

  • Bob

    Ovi player really sucks. All I want to do is transfer over music files. But no, we are forced into using this crappy software. I cant even navigate around it, whenever I click it freezes. I am really cheesed off…. :(

  • EdwinaMount

    Both the ability to rate tracks and the Top Rated Playlist IS still available in Ovi Player.

  • nikhilcdac

    while rate tracks and top rated playlist are available in Ovi player, this data is not synchronized between phone and PC.

  • nikhilcdac

    while rate tracks and top rated playlist are available in Ovi player, this data is not synchronized between phone and PC.

  • sesliyes

    thanks

  • Matt

    I have the iTouch and regularly put music onto it using iTunes. I bought a Nokia phone about a month ago. I had initially planned to use Winamp to load songs onto my Nokia phone because I am familiar with Winamp and have always thought it reproduces music much better than apps such as iTunes. But Winamp kept tossing up messages when I was preparing to rips songs onto my phone that said I had to buy the paid version to use the codecs I was trying to use for the rip. So I decided to check out the Ovi Player. I had seen your review and was not expecting much, but the Ovi Player has surprised me. I have found that it works great. It puts a slight lag on the computer but I have not found that it is much more if any more so than the slight lag caused by iTunes. And currently neither iTunes, the iPod, the iPod Touch, or the iPhone support any of the better HE-AAC codecs?! I think it is a joke that iTunes still does not use those codecs. Those are able to store music on a device with a vastly greater compression rate while retaining a much higher quality of sound. And I am able to run the Ovi Player in the background. It is running in the background on my computer and downloading an album to my phone as I am writing this comment. And my computer is an older Compaq. Maybe you tried an early version of the Ovi Player and it has been upgraded since? The Ovi Player may not have all of the bells and whistles of iTunes; but from my experience so far, I think it is a better app. Plus I have never needed all of the bells and whistles. I just want to be able to easily rip music onto my phone without have it take up too much space while also keeping the music quality at a good level. And I am simply not able to do that using iTunes.

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