[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Compared to the capabilities of desktop multimedia players (see for example the excellent WMP vs Winamp vs iTunes vs MediaMonkey for more info on their capabilities), the mobile ones certainly lack when it comes to fetching, searching for, editing, storing and, in several cases, even accessing / displaying different kinds (album art and/or other images; textual genre / composer / title etc. info; lyrics etc.) of information in audio files. In this Bible, I explain what the non-audio information you can store in an audio file is, how you can easily and quickly find missing information and store them in your songs and what mobile players are able to access them.

What’s the point in all this?

Current media players coming with non-Windows Mobile (WM or WinMo for short) players don’t any more support direct file system access. (And Windows Mobile’s approach requires quite a few taps / button presses too, as opposed to just selecting something from its library.) This is diametrically opposed to the approach of older or not very sophisticated players, where all you needed to do is going to Open File, and you could browse the file system of your handheld right away, changing directories and selecting files to play. In some of the recent built-in multimedia players (for example, on BlackBerry (BB for short) and Symbian S60), this is plain impossible and you MUST rely on the library functionality, which is pretty much useless if your audio files don’t have metadata in them. Actually, in these cases, it's much worse than the old, library-less approach where you just opened a directory for playing back all songs in there. If you made sure your directories contained only one album, this was an adequate solution for most needs.

When you rip an audio CD in Windows Media Player (or any similar CD rip-capable app; for example, my personal favorite is CDex; see my remarks & quick tutorial HERE), WMP may not be able to fetch any information on the songs themselves.

There are major disadvantages of not tagging your songs. First, on all the operating systems, several library-based media players will list the similarly-named and non-tagged music inside only one (All music) category:

(WMP, showing the filenames. As can be seen, not even the file directories are shown. You can, fortunately, still see them by tap-and-holding a song, selecting Properties and checking out the Location attribute. In THIS screenshot, the path \Storage Card\UUSNAM is clearly visible. Still, you won’t be able to (easily) play unnamed files in a directory, unless you manually pick every, say, third 13 Track 13, 14 Track 14 etc. file and add it to a playlist. It’s really complicated. Alternatively, you can still initiate playing a file in a specific directory using [Menu/][Library/] Menu/Open File and this allows for switching between songs in the directory, but it’s still pretty awkward.)

(BlackBerry 4.5 shot. By default, it lists the files using the same name stored in different directories one after another and only Options / Properties (see the content of the pop-up dialog screenshot) can be used to make a distinction. In addition, the BlackBerry operating system doesn’t have a built-in file explorer tool; that is, you can’t start playing a given song in a given directory by simply navigating to it with a file explorer tool. Finally, the multimedia player in BB doesn’t let for selecting an individual file from inside either, unlike Windows Mobile’s media player.)

(Nokia N95 (Symbian S60v3 FP1) shot. There’s no way of getting the directory of a given file (Options / Song Details only lists – and lets for editing – the ID3 tags and doesn’t show the file system path of the song, unlike under BB or WinMo. You can’t force the player to play a given file from inside either. When you start playing back a file from File Manager, the player 1. won’t play back other songs from the same directory (unlike the case of opening a file from the WinMo WMPM, using Menu/Open File from the Library view) 2. won’t provide you access to the menus (like the equalizer or the stereo widening settings) – all you’ll see instead of the menu is THIS).

All in all, in all the three covered operating systems, NOT having tags in your audio files severely degrades the usability and flexibility of the built-in (and, at least with Windows Mobile and Symbian, some other) media player. When your songs do have metadata in them, separating different genres, albums, artists and, in some, more advanced players, even more sophisticated attributes like years etc. becomes a breeze. This is why you do want to read this Bible thoroughly to find out how this can be accomplished. Learning to make your songs tagged will save you a lot of frustration and greatly enhances your enjoying music. And don’t think it’s hard and complicated! Not in the least, particularly not with the latest tools.

Turning back to the question of current, (in cases, strictly) library-based built-in factory players on all the three platforms, all you see, when you transfer some new songs to the card or insert a completely new one is the player creating / updating the library when you start it and/or it senses a card insertion and/or you explicitly force it to update / refresh the library (Symbian: Options / Refresh on the Library screen; Windows Mobile: Menu / Update Library…; on the BlackBerry, it’s not possible to manually initiate a refresh):

(BlackBerry)