Notices

I'd do that if I had the time, or the knowledge to make it quickly. I won't hurry Martin for that, since I have a good temporary solution (keeping my D2 for music)

MediaBox on the N900 is coming along nicely. It shouldn't take long anymore until it will hit extras-testing. Maybe still in 2009.

I really hate the default media player! It's not the fact that:
-it doesn't have an equalizer
-you can't change the tracks neither via the headset button nor by longpress of the voulme keys
-or the fact that it nicely imported the quake1 soundtrack instead of ASKING! foe my musci folder

It's the fact that the songs are organized terribly!
Like on all nokias I've ever had when you look at "all tracks" there is no way of organizing them by artist with showing all the tracks on screen from the same artist.

I always have to rename my entire music collection(tags) like this:

Artist: %artist%
Song: %artist% - %songname%

Why is it so hard to show the playlist winamp like?
Artist - Title <- so logical, and easy to browse and find!

Absolutely my point! If it can do simple WinAmp-like it would be perfect. I dont want to fck around with id tags for 500 soungs at a time.
I wish they made winamp for n900, especially with it's amazing Milkdrop beat-synced visuals, ah that would be a dream come true.

Guys, there will be other options available soon. If using the testing repos is too much for you then you'll just have to wait.

Also, you have the option of writing or porting your own media player software to the platform as well. The reason the n900 is so open is so in instances like this you can locate or write your own alternative. I'm sure you could completely replace the built-in media player if you liked with another application. How many other phones can you do that on?

Personally, the way the media player sorts things is fine by me, it does give you other options on how to sort by the way.

Also, I can imagine how difficult it would be to retag a ton of mp3's if you didn't originally tag them yourself... but that would mean you downloaded them or got them from a friend who simply didn't tag them properly. So, it's not Nokia's fault your music collection isn't as well kept as they assumed a typical consumer's would be. (i.e. someone who bought all the mp3's from say Amazon.com where they come pre-tagged!) - (This is of course, barring strange things like OSTs and movie soundtracks)

Also, you can download this; http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardTagger
Which will help you retag your library automatically by identifying the songs for you. It can even help fix mis-labeled or tagged mp3's (Windows/Mac/Linux)

Big thanx to Tjgib2001 for suggesting Tag&Rename!

Song organization seems to be working like it should now! EXCEPT:

How come the N900 doesnt recognize the cover art that I import into T&R's "folder cover art" tab?

Do you really think that so less people are playing music by their pcs by opening a folder with a right-click and choosing the player?

I dont think that it is decision of Nokia how people sort their mp3s - if i wanted a phone telling me what way to use it, i would have bought Google/Android or even an i(diot)phone...

Tested some players, but they all were using the sorting methods of the system?

There may be situations where Album/Artist is just a fine sorting. But i f.e. put my "listen on the road"-music in some folders - and copy them there from various Albums.
even on the better albums there is a lot of crap i really dont want to hear when having the wish to enjoy music. and even there are different styles of music in just one album - some times i want listen to a slow track to chill and sometimes i want to listen some aggressive even from the same album.

And no - playlists are no solution, not on the N900 with such less storage... At home the playlist(s) may links to all the files on the mediaserver - but the N900 does have much to less memory for storing all the albums on it...
so when using a small device as an mobile phone, i copy only the wanted folders to it. (folders i.e. sort of music for a special mood)
In my car it would be not important, there i have a HDD connected to the radio... but on small devices with only a couple of gigabytes of storage.

So it would be nice to know if there is a media player for maemo5 which is (nearly) release status and plays songs by folders...

Playing songs by folders is ******ed on so many levels. Tag them properly. Or use a legal music service.

Say you're a big fan of hip hop (thats what its called now right?), well these days all their songs are collaborations (which I rather like). So you've got Akon ft Nelly, Timbaland, and Britney Spears. Whose folder do you put it under? You could say put it under Akon, but maybe he just produced it and didn't actually have any singing parts, so really you want it under Nelly since he sang most of it.

Or you can copy the song into each folder, but then you have 4 copies of the same thing.

Its just plain idiocy to do things this way when you can just use metadata. Its so much simpler. I don't even organize my folders because Zune does everything for me. I highly suggest it.

I agree with Swirnoff on this one. I have a lot of music in mp3 format and I use folders to organize them. ID3 tags are messed up and I don't want to bother editing them. Using playlists is not really a good option because I add music once in a while to the folders and I don't want to make new playlist every time. There should be a feature to play contents of a selected folder in the default music player, and it could be easily and quickly implemented.

I just plugged my N900 in harddrive mode to my pc, opened windows media player, hit sync, and all was well.