As many of you noticed the updated Music Player in S60 Feature Pack 1 lists Music and Podcasts separately. Some of the S60 devices with the new Music Player include N82, N95, N95 8GB, and N81. Now you may be wondering what’s the difference between Music and Podcasts, and how does the Music Player know what is a Song and what is a Podcast episode?

The main difference between Music and Podcasts is that audio in the Podcasts section will automatically save the place of where you last listened. It works like this, let’s say you have a 30 minute train commute to work and you have an hour long episode of TWiT that you want to listen to. You start listening to TWiT when you leave your home and head for work, when you reach your work after listening for 30 minutes you Stop playing the Podcast episode. When the playback is Stopped the position where it was playing is saved. Then when you start playing the same episode of TWiT again on your commute back home it will start playing from where you left off. The position will also be saved if you are playing a Podcast and then skip forward to another episode. The benefit of this feature of course is that when you continue listening to a Podcast you already partially listened to, there is no need to fast forward through the stuff you already heard. If you want to start from the beginning of the episode again simply start playing it then press Left on the keypad, this will start playing the episode from the beginning and remove the previously Saved position. Music Tracks listed in the Music category will not save the last played position when music playback is stopped.

So now that you know the difference between the Music and Podcasts section how does the Music Player know what’s a Podcast episode and what’s a Music Track?

There are 2 ways that audio is categorized automatically as being a Podcast:
1. The audio file has Podcast as the Genre in it’s meta data.
2. The audio file is saved in the Podcasts directory on the Phone Memory or Memory Card.
If you use the S60 Podcasting application to download an audio episode, most audio files will be saved in the Podcast/Sounds/ directory and thus will automatically be categorized as a Podcast.

Tip: If you find a Podcast has been listed in the Music category you can move it under the Podcast category in order to use the Last Played Position feature. Highlight the Title of the track and press Options -> Song details. Scroll down to the bottom where the last detail says Library: Music. Change that from Music to Podcast and then confirm the move. The audio file will then be moved into the Podcast section. To move a Music track from Podcasts to Music view the Episode details then select Music as the Library instead of Podcasts.

Original post by Devin Balentina