UTube downloader for YouTube videos, FolderPlay updated, hide your ringtones from your music player

UTube

UTube is a mobile Java application which loads www.s60v2.110mb.com/tube.html into your mobile phone web browser. Through this site you can download YouTube videos to your phone.

You can download YouTube videos in FLV, 3GP, and MP4 format, and you can choose different quality settings too. Keep in mind some formats won't play in RealPlayer. Choose 3GP to be sure it plays in RealPlayer (FLV and MP4 may work, but you may also get sound without video in RealPlayer), or use an alternative player such as CorePlayer.

The interface of the UTube downloader needs to be improved. It doesn't have a built-in YouTube search function, and you have to type or copy/paste the full YouTube video URL into the UTube downloader. Since most Symbian browsers don't let you copy the URL of the current page to the clipboard, this means lots of typing or saving the page as a temporary bookmark to copy the URL.

Videos are downloaded to the standard downloads folder of your phone.

Instead of installing the program you could just as well save the UTube downloader site as a bookmark, since all the program does is launch your browser anyway.

The program is still in beta testing, so lets hope the UTube downloader will improve. A few suggestions:
1) let the downloader capture the currently open YouTube URL from your browser so you don't have to type or copy/paste the URL yourself,
2) let the user choose in which folder the video is to be saved,
3) let the user choose a name for the saved video, because "video.mp4" is not very informative.

• UTube v1.00 beta at Mobile Castle UPDATE: this link expired
• UTube downloader page, second UTube downloader page UPDATE: these links expired


FolderPlay

The built-in Symbian music player sorts music by tags, but not by folders. Enter FolderPlay. This program looks like a file manager. If you navigate to a folder with music, it will play all songs in that folder. Unfortunately FolderPlay doesn't handle subfolders well: if you play a folder with songs and more songs in subfolders, it will only play the tracks in the first subfolder and ignore the other songs and folders.

FolderPlay plays MP3, WAV, FLAC, APE, AC3, and other files, but not WMA. The latest FolderPlay update also plays mono FLAC and AC3, and Wave List chunks in WAV files.

There are other ways to play music organised by folders. Music Launcher is similar to FolderPlay, but MusicLauncher does it better. PowerMP3 and TTPod sort your music by tags and by folder structure, and there's a folder structure workaround for the built-in Symbian music player.

• FolderPlay


Hide your ringtones from your music player

Symbian's built-in music player adds all sound files on your phone to its library. This includes your ringtones, and also your voicemails and other recordings if you save them in MP3 or AAC format.

But there's a way to keep unwanted tracks out of your music player library: use a file manager like X-plore, ActiveFile, or Y-Browser to set the attributes of the folder with unwanted tracks to "system" and update your music library. Now your ringtones won't show up in your music player. They will also be hidden from Symbian's File Manager, but they stay visible in the Profiles personalisation screen and the contacts program so you can still change your rintones. If you want to add new ringtones, you'll have to remove the "system" attribute from your ringtones folder first. Don't forget to reapply the "system" attribute, or else your ringtones will reappear in your music player when you update its library.

You can also use PowerMP3 instead of the built-in music player. PowerMP3 makes it easy to exclude ringtones from its music library.