My'Sound Beta 3 Released for Public!

Wondering how i spent my prize money from the photo competition? Well i donated a small sum to a French Developer known as R4p43l who has been working on a promising new music player called My'Sound! I got an early preview of Beta 2 which was still for donators only, and frankly speaking i was rather disappointed with the application.

After installing it i was just bursting with excitement, only to be greeted by fonts that look like little boxes in the application, like this "E[][][][][]". First thing i did was contact the developer, R4ph43l of course, but he seemed puzzled as hell and denied it was a problem with his application.

Ahh, that's when i realised R4ph43l didn't take into consideration that APAC region phones use APAC fonts with Chinese support, a little different from the Euro region fonts. I'd like to thank bidboy from Symbian Freak for being so helpful and sending me a copy of the Euro fonts and CK for downloading them. What i did was route them with using FontRouter LT to replace the default fonts and poof! My'Sound worked just fine.

Still, compared to the Hype Symbian Freak created about this application, this application will disappoint some users. First of all, even after i talked to R4ph43l about this problem and sent him a copy of the APAC fonts it seems he still hasn't solved the fonts problem in Beta 3. Users with APAC phones of APAC fonts will have the "[][][][][][]" box problem.

Secondly,  it seems as though this "Public" version is no full version. Once you open the application it will pop up asking for a full licence code. Even for donators like me my old code does not work and i had to reactivate my IMEI. Not a problem thanks to R4ph43l's easy reactivation method available on his web site. The trial version does not allow : Mood, Folders, Shake-Me!, Themes, Disable red key and 10s mode. R4ph43l expects a donation of no less than 3€ for a complete version.

The application is rather basic i would say, and you need to have the album art JPEGs ready if you want it to look good. My'Sound, supposedly focused on music itself isn't even able to read the album art embedded in all my music files.  JPEGs of the album art need to be put in the same folder as the song albums for My'Sound to pick them up, a rather troublesome task for users who have their entire song collection chucked on their phones.

The Shake-Me! function is more for showing of than being practical considering it is so sensitive. A slight tilt of the phone changes the tracks and in the real world the only time you'll keep your N95 in a perfectly horizontal manner is when it's on the table. I would take Samir's ShakeMe application and Nokia's built in music player any day of the year compared to My'Sound if i wanted to "shake-to-change" tracks practically.

On a more positive note, i really like the fact that R4ph43l has made several improvements to Beta 3. For instance in beta 2 My'Sound was only able to scan a predefined number of folders in the phone. If you had your music elsewhere in personal folders the application wouldn't be able to pick it up. R4ph43l fixed this problem by incorperating a simple file browser into beta 3 so you can manually select and play music from your personal folders.

My'Sound also has neat little features like gorgeous themes, MoodMe functions, crossfading (which i would really like to see in Nokia's default music player), sleep mode and several other little bells and whistles that make it a promising music player if R4ph43l fixes most of the bugs. It would also be nice if he could add multimedia keys support for devices such as the N95 and N96.

In a nutshell My'Sound isn't really what i expected but there is a promising future for this application. Many improvements need to be made but i'd say this french developer has made a good start to changing the way we look at mobile music players. The thing i like most about My'Sound - .wma support!

Do try out this Python written music player, click on the link below to download.

My'Sound Beta 3 by R4ph43l

..and why not visit R4ph43l's website for more information.

 

Here are more screenshots taken from my phone, there are two other theme, one green and one blue but i did not include them in the screenshots.