The aftermath of #NokiaLondonLoop

WOW.

What a huge day! After getting down to London really easily, I got off the tube at Westbourne Park and bumped into my good friend Jon. Result! He knew where we were heading too. 😉

Anyway, we headed to the world famous Sarm Studios to begin our day of looping. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from the day but was surprised by the results and the cool people I met along the way.

1st up, big props to the WomWorld team, especially Meg and Katy who organised the event and met us when we got to the studio. Also in waiting was the lovely Dani who although I’d spoke to many times, had never actually met!

As we all sat chillin upstairs from the studio, the big dog Aaron turned up too. Quality bloke and basically the man @ Sarm. Check out the list of people that he gets to deal with day in day out… bit different from your normal customers I’d guess 😉

Anyway, what was the craic?

The Nokia Loop app is available exclusively on the Ovi Store. Its a pretty big file standing at 15.83MB so best to DL over Wifi. The premise is that you get a base beat, or even make your own and you add little bits of everyday sounds. This is the promo video:

Clearly, that was a bit of a pro job from Carl Faure / Shanghai Warrior and team, so some of you might think it was a little bit better than what we came up with, but personally, I think ours a mad skills! Here is my top 3 though that I made on the day, the last loop actually being ‘the 1st place loser’ to #toiletloop in the awards.

BollyLoop #NokiaLondonLoop by itsnoel

Loop! Wakey Wakey by itsnoel

Its Hammersmith by itsnoel

So, what do you think?

The winning loop track for the friendly competition at the end of the day was from Mac of mostlythis.com and is called Loo Fi (#ToiletLoop), which if you listen closely, is a perfect name for it. Here it is:

Loo Fi Loop ( #ToiletLoop ) by maclondon

At the end of the day we needed to pick one of our loops to play in the studio to everyone and then it would be decided who’s the winning one was. The judges, Aaron, Phil and some of his other friends from Nokia went into Studio 3 booth to pick a winner… which turned out being Mac’s.

Here’s what he won!!

These are a few of the studio snaps I took with the Nokia N8 whilst there, and a very cool studio it was, though to be fair, I have only ever been in one other studio and that is Yellow Arch studios which brings back some old memories!

After all the looping we went to the Electric Brasserie and had some drinks and food and more chat. A great end to the evening.

So great, that I missed my train home! Luckily though,  I managed to catch the last one back to Sheffield but it stopped at every station on the way home and then there were trespassers on the line near Leicester so I didn’t roll in till 0200hrs. I was shattered!  At least I had the BH905i headphones to listen to my music on the way home. Thats another post though.

 

 

Ovi Music Unlimited Rant (part #whatever)

OK, I’ve how just about hit breaking point with this service.

Following on from the previous posts, the backup that I did of the tracks completely failed.

Not only that, but when restoring the data it takes AGGGGGEEES!!! If you want me to define ‘AGGGGGEEES’ I mean 6 hours to reach 8% of the track restore (17GB in total)

Not only that, but the restore is pointless as you still need to go and re-acquire the license. So that made me think, forget it. I’ll just download them all again. Which I have started doing.

But guess what. DRM comes back to bite me in the ass again, as re-downloading an album from the history page seems to only do that, and NOT THE ACTUAL LICENSE FILE to play the DAMN TRACKS! It is totally ridiculous. When this subscription year is over, (although with all these issues (some undocumented here) are taken into account, its more like 10-11months) I wont be going anywhere near Ovi Music Unlimited side of things.

Of course the store itself is good if you want to pass your hard earned pound/euro/rupee over as you’ll now receive an MP3 without DRM stuffed in it. Imagine, you could use the track as a ringtone! wow

Ovi Music license update

Well, after waiting for it all to upload back to the handset it failed. All the tracks are back, but no licenses which means a whole load of clicks now to get all my tracks back. I really hate DRM music. Essentially, you can TOTALLY IGNORE MY PREVIOUS POST!!

Syncing your Nokia contacts to your car via Bluetooth

So, over on the various forums I’ve frequented, and with the interest in mobiles and cars, I’ve been asked this question many times. It nearly always revolves around someone having a Nokia Phone and a problem with them syncing that phone’s contacts to the car for communication via the dash or the head unit. There’s not a problem with calls, its just this issue with being able to see your phone book.

So if you are one of those wondering, “How the hell do I get my contacts to my car from this Nokia N8?” … or Nokia N97 or whatever Nokia you may have picked up, this will help.

To quote myself from the 1st time I wrote this out (I thought this was worth salvaging from the old blog posts)

You need to download a file from Nokia that is called “810 contacts Download Application” and just for you, this is the link. Find your phone or equivalent and get that version. If you have the Nokia N8 the 5th edition version works just fine, even though you’re on Symbian^5.

I’d wait until your going to go off for a drive.

Then,

Delete any pairing.
Turn off BT
Restart phone.

Go to Menu > Applications (or equivalent) and select the new download icon (pixelated car/pc pic) and launch that.

You should get a prompt saying bluetooth is off, turn on… so accept that and let it turn it on.
Turn car to ignition to evoke the BT scan and pickup.
Download program should after a few seconds prompt for passcode
Once thats done, your phone is paired with the car. You may want to go into your phones BlueTooth settings and set it to an authorised pair (recommended).

Then….

Go drive.

I sat in my car trying it for ages … without driving…. and it didnt work.. probably because I didnt wait long enough or it didnt happen quick enough. I then drove to work with it started and in the 10 mins it took to get there, it had done it. Now the menu button on the Audi displays the phone book.

Once the phone has paired, the download program should go to transferring..

after that, you can enable autostart on the app if you like.

When you’ve got connection, pressing the command key on the Audi looks like this on connecting, number check and name check.

I forget now if you need to keep auto start enabled. Leaving it on does leave the phone often popping up with connecting or some such when its not actually doing anything, so its 1 you’ll need to choose for yourself that one.

This worked on Audis, BMWs, Jags, Fords, Skodas, VWs… so you should be good whatever car you are driving.

Over on I have a growing thread with a variety of handsets that work with the VW Audi group cars so check that out too for info (and of course, feel free to sign up on the forum for some great info, banter and group deals)