Mobile Phone Blog

MikSLP, super moderator of SE-NSE Forums has post great review of SensMe™ function. Poeple who has purchased a W910i or W890i must be familiar with this feature. But for those who may not know, here litle explanation of SensMe™ :

What is SensMe™ and how can I use it?
With SensMe™ you can discover music by mood. The phone knows the mood of each song without you entering information such as slow, fast, major, minor, acoustic, electric etc.

How to use SensMe™
From standby go to “Menu” > Media.
Scroll to Music > SensMe™ and select “Open”.
Use the Navigation key to preview different tracks.
Select “Add” to choose an area of tracks.
Select “Create” to view the playlist in the Walkman® player.

Note: this is NOT the Shake Control feature as many sites seem to be very confused with.

In order to make use of SensMe™ you must install the Sony Ericsson Media Manager software supplied on the disc and I initially thought that the software had to be used to transfer the music to the phone. Indeed transferring via the SE Media Manager is one way to add SensMe™ data but the transfer is rather slow.

After a little experimentation I discovered that the SensMe™ data is permanently added to the MP3 files as meta data on the ID Tags. This is very good news as once your music has been tagged it can be transferred through Windows drag&drop for example and the phone will still recognise the SensMe™ data.

Furthermore you can make the Media Manager analyse all the music on your computer without actually transferring it to the phone. This took a long time (10hrs to tag 24GB of music!) but as the tags are permanent the meta data is now added to all my music and it is not necessary to use the Media Manager software for transfer.

Once on the phone the SensMe™ function displays the music on a graph with Sad-Happy and Fast-Slow on each axis and allows you to choose a group of music by mood and tempo.

There are some songs which appear to have been put in the wrong area but on the whole I found it to be remarkably accurate. Of course a system designed to analyse beats and acoustics won’t always get the feeling of a song totally correct.

Once populated you can move around the graph to select a group of tracks, rather irritatingly though the phone automatically plays each track you move to and there seems to be no way to prevent this.

After selecting the area you wish to play you may expand or contract your sphere of influence to encompass a larger or smaller number of tracks for your playlist.

It is also possible to select several groups to add to one playlist, selected tracks are shown in orange. Once created playlists can of course be saved.

One flaw with the system I have discovered is that it appears when the graph is heavily populated with a large number of tracks, some inevitably fall in the same place on the graph and the phones does not appear to recognise both tracks. This is evident by the fact that the number of tracks shown under my SensMe™ menu is 739 but when selecting every dot on the graph to add to one playlist only 646 tracks are selected.

Overall I think this is an excellent feature and one which I hope Sony Ericsson perseveres with. The fact that your music is permanently tagged with the SensMe™ data is a huge plus and I would like to see implementation in other devices such as Sony Walkman, Sony PS3 and a player for PC/Mac which can make use of the data too.

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