Noknok

We’re getting excited about the Nokia X6, as so many new cool apps and features keep popping up, For instance, this week it was a new music app that ships with the phone – Playlist DJ for Nokia X6. This nifty little app analyses your music and can conjure up custom playlists for you based on your mood. If you can’t wait for the Nokia X6 to arrive on a PAYG tariff, though, don’t despair. Playlist DJ is available for download from Ovi Store for the Nokia N97 and Nokia 5800 smartphones. Check out our Playlist DJ review and see if it helps you set the mood….

Playlist DJ is a music app for Symbian S60 5th Edition phones that allows you to tap into your music collection and allows the phone to choose tunes that suit your mood. The first time you run Playlist DJ it will need to have a good rummage around through your music collection. This process runs in the background (although you can display a progress bar if you want) and can take a while if you have a lot of music on your phone.

The analysis is done in two phases – firstly it will take a ‘fingerprint’ of each track and then check the online Playlist DJ database for any data about that track. Secondly, any unidentified tracks will be ‘deep scanned’ – analysing tempos, etc. Both phases require an internet connection, so we would recommend running this over a wifi link.

With the analysis done, we were able to start making playlists. Playlist DJ offers two way of doing this. You can either tell it your ‘mood’ by manipulating four sliders (Joy, Passion, Anger and Tempo) or just give it a sample track and ask it to base its selections on that.

Check out our Nokia X6 Hands-on

Fiddling with the sliders is easy enough, although something of a black box. You are adjusting four variables but the decisions the app makes seem only partially influenced by your selections.

Much more satisfying was asking for a playlist based on a particular track, which produced playlists that you could genuinely see some kind of logic behind. Bat For Lashes led to MGMT; Elbow to Fleet Foxes; Yeah Yeah Yeahs to CSS. A nice touch is that this method of playlist creation will kick in whenever you start Playlist  DJ with a track already playing – giving you a quick ‘more like this’ option.

One caveat is that Playlist DJ can’t necessarily tell if something is actually music or not. The music discovery process fell over after about an hour on our N97 – largely, we suspect, to it trying to make head or tail of the Collings & Herrin Podcast.

Getting this app for free with an X6 will obviously be beter than paying for it, but £4.00 seems pretty reasonable to us. Playlist DJ is an app that can really help you get the most out of your music collection and may help you rediscover some tracks that you had forgotten altogether.

Details

Type: Music

Size: 0.331 MB

Price: £4.00

DOWNLOAD: Playlist DJ

Check out our Ovi Store: Playlist DJ Review image gallery: