[General Topics] Menneisyys:
For example, in the above three screenshots, I’ve shown a way to create a playlist containing the songs of a Finnish pop band (here, referred to as "2n maanantai") which is rated at at least 4 stars. The playlist is named Best of 2n maanantai and can directly be used on mobile clients after synchronizing them there.

Auto playlist creation is, generally, non-existing on mobile devices. Doing the same manually, in general, involves considerably more work.

With the library-based approach, you can do, essentially, the same on mobile devices as with auto playlist creation: you can select what you want to listen to based on several factors. With simpler approaches employed by most players (except for CorePlayer, which has an even more advanced approach), you can traverse in at least the categories Artist, Album and Genre and select the artists, albums and/or, inside them, the songs you’d like to play. You can play the entire (sub)category too – as with all songs.

This in no way involves playlist creation. You only need to create playlists in a library-capable app when you need to express some logical functionality otherwise not playable using the traditional library approach. For example, if you have albums A, B and C of, say, the Artist X, and you’d only want to listen to two of the three (and not the third) albums, you can’t easily do this using the standard library functions of any of the three operating systems (none of them support multiple selections) – you must create a playlist, putting the two favorite albums in it.

The even more advanced (but, unfortunately, for a newbie, pretty much convoluted) CorePlayer is an exception: with it, you can make multiple selections, which helps in not having to make playlists at all to account for logical decisions like the above. For example, to select three of the five artists to play back, you only need to check in the checkboxes in front of the given artists:

(WinMo screenshot; the same is done in exactly the same way under other operating systems)

This will make sure the playback will only iterate over the songs of the three selected artists, not all of them. You can’t do the same in other, non-multiple selection-capable players – again, in them, you could only select one artist to play back. In this respect (too), CorePlayer is vastly superior to all the (current) alternatives. Unfortunately, this also means people do complain about CoreTheque’s (the name of CorePlayer’s library system) being overly complicated. I thought exactly the same when it was first released – it took even me a bit of time to learn it and to understand in what ways it’s superior to the single-selection, far more restricted library system of the other players.

Now that you see the point in having correctly built-up and managed libraries, let’s take a closer look at how you can actually provide your songs with this metadata.

1.1	WMP tag finding & reading

Fortunately, you can save yourself some hours of entering all the metadata (genre, artist, album, song title etc.) by using automatized tools. Of them, I recommend Windows Media Player (WMP) the best for looking up and entering at least textual, non-lyrics data (artist, genre etc.). (Please don’t come telling me why I don’t recommend other tools instead. For example, THIS thread states WinAMP also has auto-tagging capabilities. I want to keep the size of this Bible acceptable; this is why I don’t review other tools in this chapter.)

When you let WMP to read all your (still untagged) audio files into its library (and you do have an Internet connection), WMP will automatically connect to its database back-end to try to recognize your songs. (Please consult THIS tutorial on how the library should be operated in WMP. I do not elaborate on the basics of it, only the advanced features like auto playlist generation.)

To do this, it in no way tries to make use of the current filenames or the directory name your files are stored in. Instead, it compares how the song sounds to the stored songs in its library. (While I’m also a DSP engineer and am pretty well versed in everything physical telecommunication, I don’t know how exactly this is done other than it should be some kind of a simple time-domain or a combined time & frequency-domain pattern matching, also making use of the actual song index inside an album. One thing is certain: WMP doesn’t upload the full song to an approximate comparison to the database, only a small "blueprint" of it.)

This library is based on customers’ existing tag (and album art) contributions. Just for a check, to see whether I have better results with a locked-in, fully commercial system like the Zune, I’ve tested the same with my Zune to see whether being commercial and only available to paying Zune customers. The desktop Zune app (which is definitely inferior to that of WMP – as is, in my opinion, ALL the media manager apps coming with ALL non-Windows Mobile platforms) only found few additional titles; 9 of them was a false hit (for example, mistaking nine of the songs for Snoop Dogg’s The Blue Carpet Department), only a few OK (Ismo Alanko; Juliet Jonesin Sydän - Helppo Elämä – Haluan olla poikaystäväsi; Leevi & the Leavings; Raggars). In some cases, it found the artist (SIG) on compilation disks but took it for another song based on the index of the songs. An example of this is SIG’s Hyvää Syntymäpäivää, which it mistook for Purppura – Paratiisikesä because the former’s index was 9. It didn’t find more album arts than WMP either. Frankly, I would have thought Zune’s desktop manager fares better than the free WMP in this respect.

After WMP has found all the missing info, sooner or later, it updates the original song files (MP3 and WMA only; it’s only with additional plug-ins like WMP Tag Support Extender that it becomes able to write - and, with some formats like OGG, only read - tags) with the just-found info on the hard disk. (On my HP TC1100 tablet PC with 1 GHz CPU, 1.5G RAM and 160GB HDD & no other programs running, this happened almost instantaneously, on my IBM Thinkpad a31p with 768M RAM and 120 GB hard disk, only after some days. I couldn’t find a way to force WMP to do this – "Apply Media Information Changes" doesn’t seem to do the trick.)

Before this physical file update takes place, it’s only WMP’s own library that has the newly found tags, not the physical files themselves. During this, you can only make your only media files that you synchronize with your handset with WMP have all the newly-found tags. In addition, this information will be strictly available for the built-in stock player only (on Windows Mobile, WMP Mobile; on the N-series Symbian S60v3, Music Player), not other third-party players (or at least not the ones I’ve tested) - not even CorePlayer. The reason for this is simple: WMP uses a special library descriptor format not compatible with most? all? third-party multimedia players.

This also means non-updated files that you physically copy to your handset (through, say, a card reader with a simple file copier app like Total Commander or the built-in File Explorer) won’t have any tags in them. Therefore, you should wait until WMP does update the song files physically with the song metadata. You can easily see this because, then, their timestamp changes (and their size may also increase). After this, you can safely use any tool to copy your files – all third-party apps will be able to read and process their tags. Library-capable apps will be able to create a library very similar to that of WMP; non-library-capable apps (the majority of the players) will, at least, display this info and use it for other, dedicate functionalities like looking up lyrics or album art. I’ll later elaborate on the library-capable, advanced mobile multimedia applications.

1.2	Searching for missing tags not found by WMP

There inevitably will be cases when your desktop WMP doesn’t recognize your songs, particularly when they aren’t English or they aren’t stored in an album but are separate songs. Then, you’ll need to do some extra work. Don’t be afraid: it’ll be much easier than you think! There will be almost absolutely no manual work and tedious metadata entry involved.