Kinoma Notes

We’ve got a fresh, ready-for-the-weekend update to Kinoma Play (and FreePlay) for everybody today.

You’ll be notified about the update automatically. Or to update immediately, go to Kinoma Play’s Main screen, show the menu pod and select Player > Check for Updates.

Improvements…

• File associations — Kinoma Play now manages file associations instead of depending on Microsoft’s installer. This improves compatibility with the “Set as Ringtone” feature on Windows Mobile phones, helps ensure that content downloaded with web browsers (MP3 and JPEG files, etc.) goes to the correct folders (My Music, My Pictures, etc), and allows the names of special folders to be properly localized.
• Improved handling of DRM’d content — Kinoma Play now checks for the presence of DRM, and will now automatically pass DRM-encrypted content to its default player.
• Spanish language support — ¡Qué bueno!
• SHOUTcast — Kinoma Play now uses a more reliable SHOUTcast directory server.

…and one fix

• Unicode in MP3s — Some MP3 files with 16-bit Unicode text in their ID3 tags could cause Kinoma Play to hang. If you ever run across one of these, it’ll now work great.

Kinoma Play is designed to work on all Windows Mobile phones. You can always find an up-to-date list of all phones known to be compatible with Kinoma Play at http://kinoma.com/support/devices/play/.

Enjoy!

Earlier this week I described how to add Kinoma Play as a Speed Dial entry on smartphones running Windows Mobile Standard as a super-fast way to launch Kinoma Play.

On Windows Mobile Professional (a.k.a. Windows Mobile for Pocket PC), you can use the Buttons application in Settings to create a similar shortcut. Here’s how:

Go to your phone’s Start menu and select Settings, then choose Buttons.

Now choose the button you want to assign to Kinoma Play. I assigned Kinoma Play to the “Hold Side” button, since I rarely used the app assigned to it by default.

Now you can launch Kinoma Play by pressing the button you picked. In my case, I just press the Side button for a couple seconds and and Kinoma Play leaps to attention. (Sweet!)

Giving you another way to stay on top of U.S. election news, we’ve added Fox News’ brand-new America’s Election HQ channel to Kinoma Guide.

The channel exclusively on the last 30 days of the presidential election season, and features the latest breaking political news, candidate interviews, polls and in-depth analysis of campaign issues.

You can find this new channel at Providers > Fox News > America’s Election HQ. Or, just search Kinoma Guide for “Election HQ”.

No, it’s not an insurance company. No, it’s not the curse-word-substitute used by a popular sci-fi series — FLAC is an audio compression format. It’s different than other popular audio formats because it does lossless compression.

MP3s at 128 kbps can sound really good. But the bitrate of the uncompressed CD source is over 1,400 kbps — 11 times larger! To achieve low bitrates MP3 encoders do lossy compression, which is a nice way of saying that they throw out a lot of hopefully-unnoticible audio detail.

FLAC, on the other hand, is all about quality. It’s only capable of perfect, bit-for-bit digital audio reproduction. But audio encoded in FLAC is still only about half the size of the uncompressed CDs source.

Interesting note: Although FLAC files need about 5 times the space of average MP3 files, playing FLAC files uses less CPU time (and so less battery power) than playing MP3 or AAC files.

Lots of apps can create FLAC files, but I can recommend Winamp or MediaMonkey for Windows users. (For the unhealthily-obsessed, using Exact Audio Copy for ripping can be worth the usability challenge.)

If you’re not willing to compromise on audio quality just because you want to take your music with you, then FLAC and Kinoma Play are the perfect combination.

• FLAC [Wikipedia]

To say the least, it’s been a roller coaster of a week in the financial markets.

A headline from today’s Wall Street Journal says, “Worst Crisis Since ’30s, With No End Yet in Sight”. More than ever, it’s important to stay in touch with financial news.

To help you do that, I’m happy to announce that Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg Radio and several Bloomberg podcasts are now available in Providers > Bloomberg.

Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg Radio provide live business and financial news 24 hours a day. Bloomberg podcasts provide on-demand access to news and info on everything from world markets to politics to the business of sports.

We hope you’ll find this new content useful, and that it’ll help you navigate the rough financial seas we’re currently sailing though.

(Do you have suggestions for Kinoma Guide? Let us know by emailing content@ our domain.)