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Leaving aside the whole thorny issue of whether people want to pay for and download music Over The Air (I don't) and then be restricted in what they can and can't play the files on (I don't), the formats involved are very much worth mentioning. Let's start with a typical Joe Smith, he owns a hundred or so CDs and he wants as much of his music as possible on his Symbian smartphone, to save bothering with a standalone music player.
In the past, I've always advocated such a user rolling up his sleeves and getting to grips with Ogg Vorbis, an Open Source music compression scheme which allows users to store CD-quality music at 64kbps (roughly 500K per minute of music). However, few people in the mainstream world have heard of Ogg Vorbis and because it's free and there's noone actively promoting the system, the situation's likely to stay that way. It's not helped by the user having to have a little technical knowledge to set up CD ripping to Ogg Vorbis in the first place. Yes, it's what I use, but the average user is going to stick a CD in his PC and watch Windows Media Player boot up.
Now, Media Player rips CDs very quickly and easily, but to its own Windows Media Audio format (WMA), a proprietary system that's as efficient as Ogg Vorbis (i.e. files are half the size of MP3s of equivalent quality). By default, music ripped from your own CDs is copy protected, but unticking a single box in 'Options' (i.e. the one marked 'Copy protect music') is enough to get Media Player to produce .WMA files from your CDs that can be copied easily onto any storage disk. In this case, the MMC or DV RS-MMC for your S60 smartphone.
Now we're not talking 'Copy to device' ease of use here, but it's not far off. Just copy over the folders of music you want onto your card (or use a mass storage sync tool), put the card into your smartphone and you're away. The last piece of the jigsaw is WMAPlus!, officially the first software for Symbian OS that can decode the proprietary WMA files. Up 'til now, WMA was pie in the sky and a no-go area, but this utility makes it a reality. Interestingly, with the release of the Nokia N91 and other "Plays For Sure"-compatible hardware, sometime in Q1 in 2006, along with its associated Media Player integration, things are going to get even easier still. But in the meantime, WMAPlus! fills a much needed gap. As long as a user has a card reader, they can fill their hard disk with WMA-format music and be confident that any albums needed will also play without further conversion on their S60 device.
WMAPlus! will feel familiar to anyone who's used OggPlay or any other mobile media player. First, you get the utility to scan your expansion card for compatible files (in this case, MP3, Ogg, AAC and WMA, mainly) and then browse through the available tracks by album, artist, playlist or folder. Playback is of high quality and pretty seamless. Although not obvious from the interface, I discovered that '4' and '6' are hard wired to rewind and fast forward through a track, so you have good control of what's being played. Playback is maintained without issue when starting other programs or switching around with WMAPlus! in the background. Full marks so far.
The lowish score above is a reflection of my gut feel that WMAPlus! hasn't been fully rounded yet. The volume boost feature worked at first, but then stopped working. Several times during the three hour test, WMAPlus! froze, Symbian OS couldn't save itself and the device had to be restarted. In addition, as you'll see from the screenshot, calling up the properties of a WMA track results in a column of zeroes, which doesn't inspire confidence.
However, despite these niggles, WMAPlus! deserves a lot of credit for making the proprietary world of WMA accessible to the S60 world. And that's a big world. With registrations and more user feedback and extensive testing under their belt, I can see this being as popular as the free OggPlay in the medium term.
[19.11.06] Filamoon Workshop WMAPlus v1.25 S60 SymbianOS Cracked-PWNPDA
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