Kinoma Notes

While playing your music, Kinoma Play displays your big, beautiful album art center-stage. But what if you find a track without album art?

This post is the definitive guide to all the places Kinoma Play looks for album art. Plus, it describes how you can add missing album art.

Where does Kinoma Play look for album art?

Kinoma Play automagically finds album art in all of these places:

• Embedded album art — Kinoma Play looks for album art embedded right within the music file itself. This includes album art stored in MP3 ID3 metadata, WMA metadata, and M4A (iTunes) metadata.
• External “folder.jpg” files – If there’s a file called “folder.jpg” in the same folder as the music file, that will be used as its album art. Usually, this file is marked as invisible.
• Microsoft album art files — Windows Media Player has its own way of associating external album art. It embeds a unique ID into WMA and MP3 files that gets an associated album art file, which must be in the same folder. The files will look something like “AlbumArt_{62E1C2F9-9EF7-4983-AD18-F6216918CBDA}_Large.jpg”, with the ID in braces matching the ID of the corresponding music file. These album art files are also usually set to be invisible.

How do I add missing album art?

All the music managers that we use provide a way to fix missing album art. Here are specific instructions for a few of them:

• iTunes — Select tracks with missing album art, then choose Advanced > Get Album Artwork. (Tip: If you’re still not seeing the right artwork in Kinoma Play, you might have multiple album covers in your file. Choose Get Info for individual problem tracks, go to the Album tab, delete all album covers and try again.)
• Windows Media Player — In Tools > Options, go to the Library tab and make sure “Retrieve additional information from the Internet” is checked. Then choose Tools > Apply media information changes to save album art and other metadata back to your music files.
• Media Monkey — Select tracks with missing album art, then right-click and choose Auto-Tag from Web. Use the pop-down menu at the top to choose the best album art, select the metadata you want to use (check “Cover” to update the album art), then select the tracks you want to update (check the top checkbox for all selected tracks).

With album art for all of your tracks, Kinoma Play can make your music look as good as it sounds!

We occasionally get this question from Windows Mobile users: “Why doesn’t the Close button, you know, close the application?”

The Close button follows Microsoft’s official Windows Mobile application guidelines, and so it puts Kinoma Play in the background. If you’re playing music (or something else with audio) at the time, you’ll continue to hear it.

I like to think of the Close button as the “go away” or “minimize” button.

The nearest Exit

Some people like to be able to manually exit their applications, and for those customers we provide the Exit command. Just go to the Home screen, show the menu pod, and choose Player > Exit.

Do I have to worry about this?

Probably not. I don’t use the Exit command because Kinoma Play doesn’t use any appreciable resources when it’s idling, and it will automatically exit when Windows Mobile says it needs the extra memory.

(We’ve had at least one report that some “homebrew ROMs” — unofficial phone software created by enthusiasts — don’t manage memory well. In that case, people might have to manually exit applications to keep their phone running smoothly.)

• The Emperor Has No Close [Windows Mobile Team Blog]

Removable memory is pretty much all alike, isn’t it?

We wish! For better or worse, there can be big differences in quality and speed between one storage card and another.

For quality, all you can really do is buy a brand you trust. But for speed, the good news is that there’s now a standard way of classifying the throughput of SD and SDHC cards — the Speed Class.

It’s really easy to understand, too. Class 2 cards guarantee a minimum transfer speed of 2 MB/second, Class 4 cards a minimum speed of 4 MB/second, etc. A card’s Speed Class should be clearly marked as a number in a round “C”, as shown above.

We recommend that you always buy storage cards that are Class 4 or higher, and we normally buy Class 6 cards ourselves.

With a faster card your phone spends less time on data transfers, which translates to more efficient media playback. As an added bonus, copying media between the card and a PC will be faster as well.

• SD Speed Class [SD Association]

The Palm LifeDrive and Palm T|X were introduced in 2005 — ancient history by device standards.

You’d think both devices be hopelessly out of date by now, but they’re still very useful and (with Kinoma Player 4 EX) still make great media players. The LifeDrive’s chubby chassis is pretty dated, but the ahead-of-its-time Palm T|X was clearly the pinnacle of Palm OS device design. The hardware still looks and feels like it could’ve been released this year.

They both have built-in Wi-Fi, which was still pretty unique back in 2005. Sadly, their Wi-Fi support is showing its age, and the LifeDrive and T|X are unable to connect with more and more modern Wi-Fi routers and access points in their out-of-the-box configurations.

The solution

For my D-Link DIR-825, the solution was to go to Setup > Wireless Settings > Manual Wireless Network Setup and choose “Mixed 802.11g and 802.11b” as the 802.11 Mode for the 2.4 GHz band. (You don’t have to worry about the 5 GHz band if your router supports it, since the devices don’t.)

Also, remember that the LifeDrive and T|X only support older WEP and WPA-PSK wireless security modes. I recommend temporarily turning off wireless security altogether, and then turning it back on once you’ve figured out how to get your device to connect to your Wi-Fi network.

Other routers

If you’d like to share specific instructions for configuring other routers, you can email us at content@ our domain and I’ll gladly add the details to this post.

Recently I announced that NPR had made some server changes that required Kinoma Player users to change their streaming preferences in order to listen to NPR podcasts.

We’ve been working with NPR to solve the problem, and I’m happy to announce that NPR podcasts will now play regardless of your streaming preferences.

So why the asterisk in the title? As you know if you’ve used other products, one of Kinoma Player’s exclusive features is that it can stream podcasts that other players can only download.

As another side-effect of NPR’s recent changes, their podcasts can no longer be streamed. This prevents Kinoma Player’s ability to resume playback, and to allow instant access even to not-yet-downloaded parts of podcasts. We’ll continue to work with NPR to restore their streamability.