Your Music Everywhere II: MicroSD, Desktop PC, Cloud, what is best?

The other day, I wrote about SlotMusic and its efforts to bring mp3 music to everyone's mobile devices. This is a lousy one-off way to get music on a phone. To use an over-burdened analogy, it is giving a man a fish rather than teaching him how to fish.
At the same time, I received a notice of a new offering from mp3tunes, called Load2Mobile:



Mp3tunes is something I have played around with off and on for some time. The concept behind mp3tunes is that you have a "storage locker" which holds all your music in what has become known as the cloud. With all your music essentially online, the idea is that you can access it from anywhere, using a web browser, winamp, iTunes, and now your mobile phone.


I first discovered mp3tunes when I was looking for a way to access my large music collection remotely on my Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, which had less than a gigabyte of storage. They used to provide an applet that allowed for direct playing of your locker with a simple app, which was a nice idea, but the implementation was never that great and it was tricky to use. Now, the app downloads the music to the tablet (the N800 and N810 typically have far more storage than the 770), which is nice as you can, for example, grab anything from your collection while waiting in the airport lounge, and then listen to it on the flight.

The application installed easily on my N75. It is a .jad file that then downloads something during install, which I am not fond of, but it was only about 45k. When I installed the application, it seemed to have auto-named my phone. I would have liked it to either use the bluetooth name I have specified, or allow me to change the name (which I cannot do) but this is a minor issue, especially since it chose something intelligible, like the model of the phone (see screenshot on the right, and forgive my theme; I am using the latest s60.com offering: Seasonal. Now that I have my N82 back I also installed the app by going to http://www.mp3tunes.com/mob. Worked like a charm and created a new destination for my mobile music named, aptly enough, NokiaN82.

To add music to your phone, you first need to view your locker with the newer web-based player, right click on a track, and add it to whichever phone you would like to see the music appear.



Clicking on the Load to option presents me with both of my phones and my windows computer. Mp3tunes knows about the computer because I have installed LockerSync on it (described below) and each of the phones because I have installed the mobile application and logged into mp3tunes from each one of them.
Adding a track to the phone is easy, you simply right click the track, then Load To -> NokiaN82. A big annoyance is that you can only go one track at a time, and all my efforts to select multiple tracks has failed, which is a major pain, even to do an entire album.

Of course, if you want to be able load tracks to your phone, mp3tunes first has to have them in their cloud. Mp3tunes provides you with what they call a "Locker", and this is the storage space for your music up in the internet cloud. The free locker gives you 2GB of storage space. For $4.95/mo or $39.95/yr, you can get a premium locker that is 50GB. This does not hold all my music, but would probably contain most people's music libraries. Using the LockerSync utility installed on my computer is the best way to get a pre-existing music collection up to your storage locker.



When you install the application, it will scan your music files to index your collection and compare it with existing (if any) tracks that are in your locker. You can just point it at your files, and let it run, placing all your music (up to your limit) on the service. With a limited amount of space, you can use the tool to selectively choose albums or tracks at a time. This app is intelligent in that if you click, say, Bob Dylan, it includes all his albums, and if you click, say, Highway 61 Revisited, it will include all the album's tracks.



An interesting thing to note. Although my N75 did not download any tracks until I had done the right click -> load to dance demonstrated above, the N82 immediately began to download the 30 or so tracks I uploaded using my computer's LockerSync utility. And then it began to complain that it needed read and write access for each and every application! The annoyances continue, but luckily this is easily fixed by going into the S60 device's app manager and giving the "Mobile Sync" application the appropriate permission settings.

I have a mixed impression of using this app for multiple devices. On the one hand, it could be nice to not have the same music distributed to all phones. On the other hand, it could become a major pain to add your music to each phone. Luckily, most people will not have to worry about this sort of thing

Coming next: the most over-looked music application for all mobile devices.
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