Nokia Music - Dictating what you can listen to since 2008

I've used some bad software in my time - hell, I've even written some of it. I thought I'd be hard pressed to find any music management software worse than Sonys own SonicStage but by golly, I've only gone and done it. iTunes not processor intensive and memory hungry for you? Enjoy the feeling of not being able to actually be outrageous enough to actually try and play any of the albums you've bought? You need Nokia Music!

Those few of you who read this blog can't help but have noticed me banging on about my new n97 and the, shall we say, interesting design features it possesses - I'm glad to see that the firmware patch was eventually released through Orange and actually did fix all the problems I was having with it. However, it'll take more than a firmware patch to sort out the hideous bloatware that is Nokia Music.

My desktop PC - with my previous install of Nokia Music - died a death a couple of weeks back - the fan finally gave up from a heady mix of dust, cat hair, bile and vitriol. Work got me a new one - a lovely HP Compaq dx2450 - and after the dull few hours of getting the typical work stuff on it, I was ready.

Having not been irritated with the Nokia Music bloatware to the point of marching to Nokia headquarters with yet, I installed the client on the new desktop. Dutifully I signed in and lo and behold, clicked on an entry called "Digital Vault" which held all of my previous downloads - brilliant, I thought, clicking the download button to get them all back - within minutes all of the albums were back in my music collection.

But could I play them? Could I buggery. Digital Rights Maintenance (DRM) prevents me from doing so - I don't have the rights to play them. The last time this happened it took two weeks for Nokia to actually sort the issue out, so I'd rather download them illegally, thank you very much. I've already bloody paid for them once.

Spent a couple of nights importing a shitload of albums into it and then went through the rigmarole of trying to assign album cover art to the majority of the ones it couldn't find. Should be simple, yes? No means of finding artwork from the web and copying and pasting like in iTunes - if it can't find it in its database, you're screwed - and, get this, even if it does find it, it spends five minutes assigning the artwork to every single track - you can't do it at album level.

How I pine for the old days of iTunes when a simple button would allow me to synchronize tunes between my PC and mp3 player - nothing quite so elaborate for Nokia Music though; Only a means of setting 'auto-transfer' settings to kick off when the device is connected and it actually recognises that it is connected (which doesn't happen as often as you'd like) and, unless I'm incredibly mistaken, you can only do it by transferring every single tune again. Utter balls.

So, come back SonicStage - all is forgiven. The half hour you would take to import a single album is nothing compared to the amount of time and frustration invested into this shitty piece of Nokia software - would I buy anything from the Nokia Music store again? No ta. I'm old fashioned in that I like to be able to listen to any music I've purchased without an error telling me that I'm not allowed to do so.