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.

What I did at the weekend by David Court, aged 38 and a third.

Neil, who moderates the blog Cleverest Pub in Britain (which I've had linked to from here for ages, and he hasn't reciprocated, the little shit has finally done so, the lovely man) has asked me to do a guest post. Click here to have a gander.

The Nokia n97 - furthermore

So, I've pretty much messed around with every feature on the n97 now and have been using it for a few days; Here's my current verdict:

The Good

1. The keyboard is brilliant to use - and contrary to my post the other day, it is backlit, but only if some fat fingered idiot hasn't disabled the backlighting while randomly stabbing keys with his ungainly sausage fingers.
2. Rather than some convoluted sequence of keypresses (hit the # key, followed by the * key, and take away the first number you thought of) the device can be locked and unlocked by flicking a single switch. A simple yet elegant solution.
3. Typing a text is as easy as anything; Don't want to use the keyboard? Don't worry; tap the screen and get an old style numeric pad appear for old-school texting (with predictive text, if need be).
   

The Bad

1. This may sound like a daft point, but it isn't obvious enough to know which way up the phone actually goes. When I grab it to pick it up, 50% of the time I'm holding it upside down. The single button (and faintly lit) icons which are at the bottom of the device aren't distinctive enough to determine its orientation that quickly.
2. Unlike the Apple store for iphone/ipod touch applications, the Ovi store is pretty poorly stocked. There's really nothing in there I want to download, even for free - my ipod touch is packed to the gills with games and apps, but I couldn't find a single thing of interest in the Noka equivalent.
   

The Ugly

1. The switch on the side that unlocks the phone seems to have a mind of its own; Sometimes when unlocking it it switches the backlight on as well (this is a good thing) and sometimes it doesn't, thus requiring a few locks/unlocks so I can see the bastard screen.
2. The Nokia Music software is dreadful. Apart from (mentioned in a previous post) the fact that my computer is telling me I don't have the rights to play something I've just fucking paid for, it's slow, unwieldy and takes just as bloody long as itunes to rip anything. Downloaded track listings are wrong or missing album covers, if you're lucky enough to actually find them at all. Manually entering track details can only be done one track at a time - Woe betide I might want to label all 11 tracks of an album as belonging to the same bloody album at once.

There's a firmware patch for it released today, supposedly, which will address some of the niggles that users have had. Whereas its slightly concerning that patches are being released less than a fortnight after a phone is launched, it's also promising that Nokia are listening to and addressing the issues with it. I haven't thrown it out of the window or stormed back to the shop with it yet, so the Nokia n97 must be doing something right.