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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Symbian music players: TTPod, Handy Music, and PowerMP3

mp3 players for Symbian TTPod Handy Music PowerMP3 Nokia
TTPod

TTPod plays almost anything you feed it: mp3, ogg, aac, mp4, m4a, wma, mid, and amr. It used to be in chinese only, but now there's an english translation. There are still some bits of chinese left, and the translation is not very good, but well enough to be usable.

TTPod has a sleep mode option to shut itself down after you've listened yourself to sleep, a built-in alarm clock with custom snooze time, and a customisable mini player for your active standby screen, which is only for cosmetic use because you can't control TTPod from the active standby screen yet.

Even though TTPod has its own mp3 tag editor (which only lets you edit the artist, title, album, and style fields), it won't sort your music by mp3 tags the way Nokia's own music player does. TTPod uses your folder structure instead. It doesn't read m3u playlists, so you better have your music well organised in folders if you have a large collection of songs on your phone.

TTPod can display lyrics, but only from a separate lyrics file. It won't display any lyrics embedded in an mp3 itself.

TTPod 3.1.0 at Mobile Castle, unsigned, no hack required UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.
TTPod 3.1.0 at Mobile Castle, for hacked phones UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.
TTPod 3.1.0 at Symbian Freak, unsigned, no hack required, RapidShare detour UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.
TTPod 3.1.0 at Symbian freak, for hacked phones, RapidShare detour UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.
Hacking and signing


Handy Music

Handy Music is a very simple music player which shows all your songs in one big list which can only be scrolled, not searched. It ignores your folder structure and your mp3 tags, so it's of no use at all if you have a large collection of songs. Imagine manual scrolling through a list of hundreds of mp3s... Handy Music lets you organise your songs in tabs, which are a kind of playlist substitute, but this is not nearly sufficient.

Handy Music from TeleSoftas UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.


PowerMP3

PowerMP3 is a music player with a promising future. It has a sleep timer, an equaliser (which doesn't work in the beta version), and an "exclude" option for files that are small or of low bitrate so you can filter your ringtones out of your music collection. It shows your album art too.

But the best of all: PowerMP3 sorts your music by mp3 tag the way Symbian's own player does, and it lets you play folders the way LCG Jukebox does. PowerMP3 also reads m3u playlists. PowerMP3 is the closest to WinAmp you can get on a Symbian phone.

Unfortunately the beta version shuts itself down after one song. This may be a bug, or it may be on purpose to stop people from using the beta test version if PowerMP3 goes commercial.

PowerMP3 at Mobile Castle UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.


The verdict

So far the best music player for your Nokia is the built-in music player, especially if you force-feed it your music folder structure with this mp3 tag trick. If you really hate the default player, TTPod is the best free alternative if you don't want to pay for LCG Jukebox.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I use coreplayer which does a decent job. Mainly use it as I can feed it my dir structure.

And one player for both vid + mp3 is a plus for me.

Especially as coreplayer can deal with most codecs, so dont have to re-encode my vids.

But coreplayer does have a big issue in that it hates multi-tasking. So if you multi-task expect choppy audio, skipping, etc..

really seems like there is no checks all the boxes music player on s60.

Always some compromise zzz..

ut.

Unknown said...

My main problem with all these players is that they don't use the power saving modes which symbian devices provide. They use more twice the power as the built in player, so the use time degrades much more then necessery.
It's a bummer that the built in player doesn't provide folder based playing considering the bigger and bigger sizes of today's music librarys.