..........
I've been wanting to get a subscription service that will stream to mobile devices (I mainly use Rhapsody on my pc, and it too will NOT work with mobile devices even though you have the option to use it through a browser-based interface) so I read your post and signed up for the 30 days trial, and sure enough it works over 3G as well.
The only problem I have is when I go to the main page through PIE on my Tytn, it automatically goes to a mobile version of the site, and I can only select certain artists that have been pre-selected based on my genre settings. There is a search line at the top where you can enter artist or album, but there is no Enter or Go button, and pressing Enter on the keyboard does nothing. In other words, I can't navigate to any specific artist, I can only listen to the pre-selected ones. Do you know how to get that search bar to work? If I go to the page on my desktop pc, the interface is totally different and getting to a specific artist is no problem.
I'm not sure what to tell you on the WMP thing... I have no issues with WMP thus far...
Neither of you have tried orb? I can't say enough about it...all of your mp3's on your PC at home are available to you on your phone 24/7. The only drawback is getting the mp3's and always leaving your PC on. It works the same way- you choose your song and it streams to WMP. This will also work for Videos and TV (with the proper setup, slinbox is far better though).
I haven't had any problems with this using wmp.
Patman,
Yes I do have Orb and use it quite a bit, and I do love it!! I stream my music and my recorded TV from my media center pc at home. BUT, the reason I wanted a subscription-based service on my phone is because you can stream any song, any artist any time. I own about 6,000 mp3's that are on my harddrive on my pc at home that I can stream on Orb, but with a subscription-based music service like AOL or Rhapsody, I have the choice of about 2.5 million songs, on-demand, at my fingertips.
stpete111 said:
Patman,
Yes I do have Orb and use it quite a bit, and I do love it!! I stream my music and my recorded TV from my media center pc at home. BUT, the reason I wanted a subscription-based service on my phone is because you can stream any song, any artist any time. I own about 6,000 mp3's that are on my harddrive on my pc at home that I can stream on Orb, but with a subscription-based music service like AOL or Rhapsody, I have the choice of about 2.5 million songs, on-demand, at my fingertips.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah I figured there was a reason.
Does it cost anything per song, or is it a time-based ($xx.00/month) service?
I'm glad others are interested. Subscription music means you pay a flat fee per month (usually around $10) and you can listen to any artist, any album, any song in their entire library whenever and (hopefully soon) wherever you want. It's the holy grail IMO as far as portable music. Especially when you don't want an iPod/MP3 Player, but rather a convergence device like this. The problem is that the flash memory is very slow, and very space limited. Streaming music from a subscription service is the way to go. Orb is a great idea, but you still have to download the songs first. Me personally, I'm fed up with downloading organizing and managing music files. It's just become tedious. I'd rather have a jukebox available at all times with every artist in existence. In other words, I'm sick of collecting music. The new technology has made me look past that.
As I mentioned, AOL Music Now is the only web based service, thus the only one that can work on Windows Mobile (Rhapsody has a web browser plugin but it only works on certain desktop browsers).
Good news though. I just discovered (or is it brand new?) that Music Now supports RSS feeds. This could really be the answer to a having a solid experience using the streaming from a subscription music service on a PPC.
You can save an RSS feed of just about anything. All the artists in your library, your playlists, all the albums, all the songs, top 20 lists, etc.
I'm about to try and find an RSS reader for WM5 that might make this a reality. Even if one doesn't exist that works well, the RSS provides an open source for others to make a music browser type interface. Who knows what will happen. One could potentially make a program for WM that reads the RSS feeds and lets you browse, select, and play music much like the interface on an iPod or something. The difference being you have up to 2 million songs to choose from at any given time.
..........
...........
Something that really irritates me is that I have my music on iTunes organized but when I transfer with DoubleTwist and play the music on Meridan Music player, it gets disorganized.
Is there any player that retains the organization from iTunes?
bTunes shamelessly mocks the appearance of the player on the iPhone /iPod Touch. It also handles the library in a similar way (unlike many other players for android, it does NOT slaughter compilations by creating an album entry for each artist)
This app is well in beta stage and is a bit rough around the edges. For me, it FCs on phone boot, but nothing seems to stop working. I cant find a homepage for the app, just search for btunes in the market.
iag48 said:
Something that really irritates me is that I have my music on iTunes organized but when I transfer with DoubleTwist and play the music on Meridan Music player, it gets disorganized.
Is there any player that retains the organization from iTunes?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
One thing I noticed is that Android doesn't have a very good Music management system. It will organize based on what your properties of each song is. It sucks because I had a terrible accident with some garbage media player once and it messed up all of my music's properties. [around 1500 songs]. I took about 2 hours fixing them all because I got tired of not having my Music organized. That's one of my biggest pet peeves.
spaceman_spliff said:
bTunes shamelessly mocks the appearance of the player on the iPhone /iPod Touch. It also handles the library in a similar way (unlike many other players for android, it does NOT slaughter compilations by creating an album entry for each artist)
This app is well in beta stage and is a bit rough around the edges. For me, it FCs on phone boot, but nothing seems to stop working. I cant find a homepage for the app, just search for btunes in the market.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks! bTunes (beta) is great. Works good enough for me on the Nexus Won.
spaceman_spliff said:
For me, it FCs on phone boot, but nothing seems to stop working..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This issue has been resolved in the latest round of updates. The dev seems to update this app quite often.
I'm looking for bTunes in a few minutes. I was actually thinking of trading my N1 for an unlocked 3GS just because it really irritates me. So will my iTunes library transfer as it is on my Mac?
Anyone able to sort their music on the N1, through any music player, BY DATE ADDED or MODIFIED??
I want to listen to the music I added to the music folder most recently.
I have a big library, and i want to listen to the new stuff first....
So, I got home with my Lumia 920, plugged it in to my PC, and found it does not sync with Zune. In my Zune library I have about 16k songs, and about 10 auto-playlists based on songs I "like", most played, etc. So, I figured its not the end of the world, and I downloaded the WP8 sync client for Windows 7 from here http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/how-to/wp8/windows-phone-app-for-desktop . This app is an extremely basic sync application that reads your entire music library every time it loads and allows you to select music and playlists to sync. For it to load completely, and go through my entire music collection, took about an hour. BUT, when it was done, I was able to select my artists and auto-playlists to sync, and they synced fine. So, a few hours later, I plugged my phone in again... the app had to reload my library again, and didn't save any auto-sync information... so I cant just plug my phone in and forget about it. This is very, very weak sauce... not so much for artists, but for auto-playlists, which is the primary way I listen to music.
So, then I decided getting all of my music into the XBOX Music cloud is the way to go, as that music automatically shows up on the phone. So, I took an image of my w7 machine, and upgraded to win8. I then opened the xbox music app, and nothing showed up, even though my libraries were configured. Why, you might ask? Well, my music is on a network share that doesnt support indexing, so microsoft has deemed it useless. No video or music from that store will show up in my native microsoft video/music applications. Sigh... ok, fine. So, then I copied 100gb of music to my data drive, and it showed up in the xbox music app fine. Then, in the xbox music app, I went to the playlists tab, and nothing showed up... BUT there was an "import playlists" button. So I went ahead and clicked that, and that imported all of my auto-playlists... which then shortly after showed up on my phone as well in the xbox music app, as they were synced to the cloud. So I figured I had finally gotten it, but I wanted to run one test. So, I opened my zune software, and marked another song as "liked", making my "songs I like" auto playlists go from 269 songs to 270. I then rebooted, and opened xbox music again, and the "songs I like" playlist would not update. So, it seems the import only imports the playlist as static, and not "auto". So, I figured I would try deleting all of them, and importing again. While that would be extremely clunky, I could deal with that. That worked, and the updated "songs I like" playlist showed up... but now they have a (2) after them. As a geek, that drives me crazy, so I wanted to go on and try another, automagic, solution.
So, I opened WMP, and let it import my music collection. No zune auto-playlists showed, so I created them in WMP. However, now WMP wont sync half of the songs on the autoplaylists, because the songs are "not supported by device". These are .wma zunepass songs... however, it will sync SOME .wma zunepass content... just not all of it. I havent figured out what it will and wont, yet.
So, thats where I am at now. WMP is working well enough, for now... definitely not a permanent solution. My biggest issue, now, is that I dont know if song plays on the lumia 920 will register in WMP, and there is no way to rate the songs on the lumia.
Oh, and one more thing, I listen to a podcast that doesnt (and wont) show up in the xbox podcast library, and there is currently no native solution for custom podcasts.
To summarize... Frankly, XBOX Music sucks. Ok, great, now music is in the "cloud" and we no longer have to plug in a cable. With wireless sync, we werent that far off from that anyway, and at least then we still had full zune functionality. Right now, XBOX Music doesn't even begin to compete with the likes of spotify, etc... XBOX Music is a very, very, basic solution for listening to music. For the most part, your only option is searching for an artists and listening to an album of theirs. Playlists are manual, and you cannot rate music, period. For me, that's enough reason to use another service with more functionality.
I didnt create this thread as a flame MS thread. Obviously, I like MS... I went to the ATT store 10 minutes after it opened to get a lumia 920, and I had a lumia 900 before that. I want this software to improve.
I feel your pain. Not as big a collection. Not sure how this works completely with xbox music in cloud. But I did the trick on my surface to show external music on microsd to show in libraries.. I am seeing playlist and some of my music in the cloud.
loudog3114 said:
So, I got home with my Lumia 920, plugged it in to my PC, and found it does not sync with Zune. In my Zune library I have about 16k songs, and about 10 auto-playlists based on songs I "like", most played, etc. So, I figured its not the end of the world, and I downloaded the WP8 sync client for Windows 7 from here http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/how-to/wp8/windows-phone-app-for-desktop . This app is an extremely basic sync application that reads your entire music library every time it loads and allows you to select music and playlists to sync. For it to load completely, and go through my entire music collection, took about an hour. BUT, when it was done, I was able to select my artists and auto-playlists to sync, and they synced fine. So, a few hours later, I plugged my phone in again... the app had to reload my library again, and didn't save any auto-sync information... so I cant just plug my phone in and forget about it. This is very, very weak sauce... not so much for artists, but for auto-playlists, which is the primary way I listen to music.
So, then I decided getting all of my music into the XBOX Music cloud is the way to go, as that music automatically shows up on the phone. So, I took an image of my w7 machine, and upgraded to win8. I then opened the xbox music app, and nothing showed up, even though my libraries were configured. Why, you might ask? Well, my music is on a network share that doesnt support indexing, so microsoft has deemed it useless. No video or music from that store will show up in my native microsoft video/music applications. Sigh... ok, fine. So, then I copied 100gb of music to my data drive, and it showed up in the xbox music app fine. Then, in the xbox music app, I went to the playlists tab, and nothing showed up... BUT there was an "import playlists" button. So I went ahead and clicked that, and that imported all of my auto-playlists... which then shortly after showed up on my phone as well in the xbox music app, as they were synced to the cloud. So I figured I had finally gotten it, but I wanted to run one test. So, I opened my zune software, and marked another song as "liked", making my "songs I like" auto playlists go from 269 songs to 270. I then rebooted, and opened xbox music again, and the "songs I like" playlist would not update. So, it seems the import only imports the playlist as static, and not "auto". So, I figured I would try deleting all of them, and importing again. While that would be extremely clunky, I could deal with that. That worked, and the updated "songs I like" playlist showed up... but now they have a (2) after them. As a geek, that drives me crazy, so I wanted to go on and try another, automagic, solution.
So, I opened WMP, and let it import my music collection. No zune auto-playlists showed, so I created them in WMP. However, now WMP wont sync half of the songs on the autoplaylists, because the songs are "not supported by device". These are .wma zunepass songs... however, it will sync SOME .wma zunepass content... just not all of it. I havent figured out what it will and wont, yet.
So, thats where I am at now. WMP is working well enough, for now... definitely not a permanent solution. My biggest issue, now, is that I dont know if song plays on the lumia 920 will register in WMP, and there is no way to rate the songs on the lumia.
Oh, and one more thing, I listen to a podcast that doesnt (and wont) show up in the xbox podcast library, and there is currently no native solution for custom podcasts.
To summarize... Frankly, XBOX Music sucks. Ok, great, now music is in the "cloud" and we no longer have to plug in a cable. With wireless sync, we werent that far off from that anyway, and at least then we still had full zune functionality. Right now, XBOX Music doesn't even begin to compete with the likes of spotify, etc... XBOX Music is a very, very, basic solution for listening to music. For the most part, your only option is searching for an artists and listening to an album of theirs. Playlists are manual, and you cannot rate music, period. For me, that's enough reason to use another service with more functionality.
I didnt create this thread as a flame MS thread. Obviously, I like MS... I went to the ATT store 10 minutes after it opened to get a lumia 920, and I had a lumia 900 before that. I want this software to improve.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I can't help but totally agree with you. This is a major oversight, especially since they didn't ease us off the Zune Player...
Well, after a few days WMP started tanking explorer.exe when trying to sync with my phone. So, I reverted to my win7 image and im using the windows phone app preview to sync music again.
un-fawking-beleivable. My computer kept tanking while trying to sync music, and I found out why. To sync, you have to unlock the phone, which I knew... but, if the phone re-locks while your syncing, the whole process is done for, and explorer will just hang until you remove the phone. SO, if you want to sync to your pc, you basically have to turn off the password lock on the phone.
I have the exact same way of organizing and syncing my music as you have. We're probably not alone and I hope this is somewhere high on the priority list.
Like you, I came from Zune with several smart playlists, most of them including the 'love track' option. It was a step back from iTunes with its 5 star range that let me create even more precise smart playlists, but it worked.
No Spotify in WP8 either, at least not for me. Can't find it in my marketplace. Last year I sidestepped to Spotify, hanging in after a good tryout deal, but Spotify lacks a lot of the songs I have listed in my playlists. So I was ready to move to XBOX Music, same idea, more songs - I had read somewhere. Jumped in with the one year deal, too quickly, too confidently.
Now I'm stuck with renaming formerly smart playlists and some songs that won't play because of some errorcode. No clue how to keep my playlists uptodate with ratings. Mind you, I've only been messing with this for two days. Time to go looking for workarounds while praying for a software update.
Guys, try MusicBee.:good:
This is a sad story, but I guess this is how it's "supposed" to be. I mean, MS kinda started from scratch (again) with their WP8, so they had to create some quick and working apps for basic needs (WP8 client). I think in time everything will get back, hopefully implementing WP8 support in Zune.
I for one I am very happing not having to fire up that Zune app everytime I want to deploy something on the phone, thought the Zune music was fine (especially with that zune pass).
PS: did you try with the Metro-style WP app?
This makes me think I should get another device for music... I have about 15gb of music I carry with me. Using Zune, its not a problem. Using something that needs to index everything at launch and not keep track of things already on the device is a problem.
In an effort to loose the "computer" requirement, they lost some basic features.
Sent from my SGH-i917 using Board Express
You could always use Google music? There's 3 decent apps in the store that work efficiently enough. Google music's uploader is optimized for...shudder...iTunes, but you can manually select folders, playlists should upload too as long as they're in the same folder. Of the three apps, I use CloudMuzik. Back in WP7 it worked BETTER than the google music app for ANDROID. Not sure now, I've only had my phone one day, but that's my suggestion.
Google's song limit is 20,000 songs, and you can have multiple users on the same account. "I really like your music library!" "Oh, really? let me hook my account up!"
Is it me or is Apple the only ecosystem that makes media synching simple across all computing devices? As an Android user, Google music is tolerable, but not great. After reading your experiences I feel like adopting WP8 would be a misstep in this regard at this point in time. Sad how behind and out of touch with the consumer market MS has been. I too hope these weaknesses become a priority with MS, especially with the launch of their next gen console this year.
How hard is it to develop official native apps that allow music (and other media) with playlists to sync seamlessly across pc, tablet, phone, and game console without having to pay the piper for cloud storage? Its 2013 for gosh sakes. Every operating system ecosystem should have this implemented and polished by now. It's not breaking news that media junkies want their data accessible on all their devices in an easy to manage manner.
I'm very tempted to invest in Apple as an ecosystem for simplifying this solution. I really hope by some miracle MS can sway me before my cell phone contract is up later this year. Honestly I want to believe they can do better than the offerings you folks are currently left frustrated with.