In a nutshell:
A music player to floor all others, at least in complexity.
What’s it good for?
Playing back music, in the most complex way possible.
Judgement time…
We’re sticklers for simplicity here at NokNok, so we were less than impressed with LCG Jukebox, which takes the simple task of listening to music, and proceeds to make it more challenging than giving astrophysics lessons to a Cheeky Girl.
What should be a straight-forward task is made awkward from the moment the app is launched. First you’ll have to remember where your music is stored, then tell the software. Unlike Nokia’s own music player, LCG Jukebox can’t scan your phone to figure this out itself.
Next up is negotiation of the software’s controls. With no on-screen prompts, it’s not immediately obvious how to stop, pause, scan backwards or skip a track. It turns out there’s a fiendish double click system at work here. A first for any Nok-based media player we think, albeit a completely inappropriate one.
The software itself is solid enough, but cluttered with unnecessary extras.
Tweaking the colour of the interface, for instance, is the most involved procedure imaginable. To change the default settings, you’re forced to alter individual interface elements, manually selecting colours (including hue, brightness and saturation) for every on-screen button or background. We tried altering it, but frankly the colour of a music player that’s largely going to stay in the background just isn’t that important to us, and it’s upon realising this that we think we hit on the software’s central flaw.
See, LCG Jukebox worries so much about getting things right, it’s afraid to make any decisions for you.
Take one of its other extra features: downloading album artwork. It’s a nice addition, but one we failed to get working, even with the most common songs in our library.
Tracks from the Arctic Monkeys and Foo Fighters all failed to match artwork, despite being popular, current, and littered across the internet. We suspect it’s because of the search criteria LCG plucks from the MP3 files, but can’t be sure. Either way, its suggestion that we search manually made us giggle. Is that a selling point? Allowing us to perform our own searches? Such luxury! In the end we resorted to loading artwork through iTunes and embedding it in the MP3 file that way. It seemed to work, and took half the time of LCG’s search.
It’s the same story with the app’s built-in lyric search. We failed to find a single song it could identify, and has to resort to singing (what we assume were incorrect) words as a sort of dirty protest.
Strangest of all, we found a hiss to come from our N95’s speakers whenever the player was paused. Had it predicted our disappointment and reacted in pantomime fashion?
We hope not, because it’s not all bad news. The basic playback functions work well, once you’ve figured out the controls and spoon-fed it your files. There’s a neat mini-icon on the standby screen too, so you’ll always know what’s playing, with or without artwork or lyrics.
Still, when there’s a perfectly serviceable music player already installed on your Nokia, do you really need this? The answer, unsurprisingly, is ‘no.’ Save yourself some hassle, and a not inconsiderable amount of cash, and avoid it.