I have a Nokia N95 (N95-1) with firmware v21.0.015. I have recently installed my Windows XP machine from scratch with SP3. That gave me the opportunity to upgrade all my Nokia PC support software with the latest versions.Nokia Music Shop has become available in the country where I live. I decided to give it a try but not being able to use Firefox should have warned me. With Windows XP SP3 I got Internet Explorer 7, so off we go. You need to install an ActiveX control that apparently tightly integrates with Windows Media Player (WMP). So this is DRM stuff, hmm… Anyway, I bought a couple of oldies that I could have easily got illegally elsewhere so I felt pretty proud (and dumb) to put my money in the old rocker’s retirement plan and was listening happily the 1€ piece of art.

Time to move the songs that I purchased from the Nokia Music Shop into my phone. It has been written in the instructions all over in the Nokia Music Shop that you need to use Windows Media Player to synchronize their tracks with your phone’s music library. But since Nokia PC Suite is sporting a Transfer Music utility that I have used until now, I decided to give it go. The tracks from the Nokia Music Shop are marked with state Copyright procted if you want to add them into your Collection. You cannot listen them from that location but you are allowed to transfer them into the phone. Helas, they will not work in your phone either; they are marked failed in the N95’s music player after the transfer.

Ok, back to Windows Media Player, need to get my phone connected with it first. On the phone I move to Menu -> Tools -> Connectivity -> USB. I set the parameter Ask on the Connection to Yes.

I plug in the USB cable on the phone, select Media Player as USB connection type in the selection drop down list that appears. Nokia PC Suite says immediately that the phone is connected with an incompatible USB mode. The XP’s PnP detects the phone as MTP device and starts to install the device driver. The installation fails with an error “The required section was not found in INF”.

I try to connect the phone’s USB again, this time in Data Transfer mode. Now there are no problems and Windows Media Player sees the phone. Unfortunately it can only transfer MP3 files but the DRM’ed WMA files failed to transfer as the phone’s memory is seen simply as a flash disk. For the copyright protected WMA you need the MTP protocol.

No way to get the N95 to install as MTP device. I took the original Nokia MTP device setup program from the N95’s installation CD-ROM and try to install with the extracted INF files once the Windows PnP again detects the device. In vain.

Next I check with my Nokia PC suite for any updates. It says that there isn’t any. But when I go to the Nokia’s site, surprise, they have Nokia PC suite 7.0.x available. I download it and observed with some astonishment when it says No updates to Nokia PC Suite, Installed version 7.0.7.0, web version 6.86.9.0. I give the N95 Media Player mode yet another try but it still fails.

I got a hint that something may be wrong because of Windows Media Player 11 from this MP3 player forum post. The post gives you also instructions how to remove WMP11. And that does the trick:

  1. Uninstall completely Windows Media Player 11
  2. Install a fresh copy of Windows Media Player 10
  3. Make your N95 to work as MTP device with WMP 10, and oh yes, it works!
  4. Upgrade WMP 10 to WMP 11 again
  5. N95 continues now to work as MTP device..
  6. ..and the DRM enabled WMA files are now synchronized between N95’s music player and Windows Media Player 11

What a bad, bad quality control from Nokia (and from Microsoft) ! Windows XP SP3 has been out for quite a while now. By default it installs Windows Media Player 11. Nokia has failed miserably to make sure that their device drivers get updated, albeit doing that through the Nokia Music Shop by simply asking people what phone they got.

Nokia Music Shop took a several blow for me with this hassle. I am a skilled professional, foolishly ready to spend hours for my ten euro spent. What about others with no technical skills? Really a shame.

Nokia should get a single entry point (that works..) for the PC Suite: now I have a Nokia Photos, Nokia Software Updater, Nokia Maps Downloader and my latest installation (after the above episode), Nokia Music Beta (from betalabs.nokia.com). Shouldn’t they all be in a single, working package? And without need to select from four obscure USB connection modes, please.

More worries

Should you ever need to upgrade phone’s firmware, make sure that you use N-Series PC Suite’s Content Copier and not the one that comes with Nokia PC Suite. Apparently the DRM license keys will not get copied correctly unless you use the N-Series version. Read more from this post.