SensMe™ Review

By Mik, 20th of March 2008

Having recently purchased a W910i I have had my first experiences of Sony Ericssons SensMe™ function. For those who may not know:

What is SensMeTM and how can I use it?
With SensMeTM 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 SensMeTM
From standby go to “Menu” > Media.
Scroll to Music > SensMeTM 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.

Editor’s 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 Sony E ricsson 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 (10 hours to tag 24 GB 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.

sensme_review_1.jpg

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 play list.

sensme_review_2.jpg

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.

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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 play list 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 :)

12 responses to “SensMe™ Review”

Comments

  1. Octaf says:

    this SensMe support for MP4 files? such as M4A iTunes files?

    11:27 pm on 4/14/08
  2. michael says:

    i transfered songs to my w910i using drag and drop but the SensMe™ application doesn’t seem to show them! SensMe™ says i have 0 songs when actually i have 140 songs! what do i need to do so it will work?

    5:28 pm on 4/25/08
  3. Michell Bak says:

    You will have to use the Media Manager application on the bundled CD to analyse your music, and then put the analysed music on your phone, as Mik says.

    8:51 pm on 4/25/08
  4. karun says:

    does this work on the W960 as well or is it restricted to only newer A200 walkman phones?

    5:22 pm on 5/2/08
  5. Michell Bak says:

    It’s for A2 phones only, at the moment.

    6:56 pm on 5/2/08
  6. Niall says:

    i tried 2 do it but it diddnt work i used da media transfer fing aswell but it still has nuffin nd ses 0 songs on sensme do u hav 2 pay 4 da songs help plzz

    10:36 pm on 6/15/08
  7. Niall says:

    does it work on w890

    10:55 pm on 6/15/08
  8. Hisham says:

    U hve to update the library

    9:56 am on 6/21/08
  9. jj help! says:

    I have the W910i I’ve got SensMe tracks on my phone (99 out of 120) and can select them, but when I hit “create” after adding tracks, the phone says “creating playlist” then jumps back to the music menu with no sign of a playlist anywhere. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

    2:01 pm on 7/16/08
  10. adam says:

    i have the new w760i which has this feature. i have used media manager to add the sense me data to all of the songs however now i find that when i add them only a certain amount actually go into the sensme folder whereas all go into my music … (so far i have 101 tracks all analysed for sense me on the phone but only 39 are recognised on the sensme menu) how can i get all of the songs into both sections of the phone???

    9:02 pm on 7/22/08
  11. RJ says:

    am thinking of getting a walkman-phone, just need to know if i can upload music to the phone using itunes? or does sony require its own proprietary software to do that?

    4:22 pm on 8/25/08

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