disq

For me, the Nokia 770's Audio Player was probably the single most useful (and bug free) software on the 770. I don't want to carry a DAP/PMP along with an all-purpose tablet, (my cellphone, wallet and keys are enough clutter thank you) so the logical answer was to use a media player software. Since Canola didn't have -still doesn't have- playlist editing functionality, Audio Player was the best choice at the time being.

Then came the n800. Audio Player was gone, instead we got a unified "media player" that played both video and audio. Great.

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After playing with it the first time, I couldn't find a way to selectively add songs (or "clips", as it calls them) to the playlist. Every time I tried to add a song, it would add whole gajillion mp3's I had on the mmc instead. Then I searched the menu and the popup menu. And no, it just wasn't there.

Currently there's no way to create a custom playlist with n800's default (OSSO) media-player.

"Add to playlist" adds the whole virtual directory (all songs in the selected artist/genre, the whole music library, etc) and you can't selectively add/remove the items to/from the playlist. Because of this my new (at home/in bed) DAP companion is MediaStreamer, which only supports playing from a UPnP server and won't play any local files. On the road I have to listen what mediaplayer throws at me, as I don't like pulling the device out every now and then to choose a new genre/artist.

The 770's "Audio Player" was better regarding this, as the user could add individual files to a playlist. The n800's bundled "media player" lacks this basic media player functionality, but instead it supports fancy stuff like media streaming and file beaming. Just submitted a bug to bugzilla about this, please vote if you think it's worthy. (We could mash up a playlist editing software/script in no time, but that wouldn't solve the problem completely either, as the user won't be able to dynamically change the songs or the play order in the playlist while playing)

In addition, the new Media Player has a "Now Playing" screen, but there's no way to read the now playing information via DBUS. So forget about writing useful addons for the media player, like a now-playing home applet, or a audioscrobbler/last.fm submission plugin.

More, "Repeat one" is gone. Sad. "Sort playlist" also didn't make it, but hey I didn't use that one anyway.

So yes, Nokia/OSSO, please fix the Media Player.