Stream your own music to a BlackBerry via Wi-fi

Rating; Chonk’s MusicRoom Wifi Music Player

GoMo News found a flier from Chonk regarding its music app for the RIM BlackBerry. Considering there is a free version of this app, we decided to give it a go. No wonder the MusicRoom Wifi Music Player app has already achieved 100,000 downloads as it says on its BlackBerry Apps World page. It works well and is very simple to use. There’s only one slight catch and that’s the necessity for you to download the accompanying server software and load it up on your Windows PC. Apparently Mac and Linux support are coming soon. The PC also needs to be on the same Wi-fi network as the BlackBerry but then that shouldn’t cause too much of a problem. It very definitely works, though.

One feature we particularly liked about MusicRoom is that when the server software loaded on the PC, it automatically found all of our music – even tracks buried in our iTunes library.

The Chonk web site says that the app can play all .mp3 and .m4A formats. However, it cannot play file formats that aren’t supported natively by the BlackBerry itself. This means certain .wma files.

GoMo News didn’t try this out but it might be possible to overcome the obstacle of native music file format support by purchasing a better music playing app.

From the MusicRoom support files, it is obvious that many users have asked if it is possible to listen to your own tunes over the Net (providing the PC server software is running, of course).

Chomk says it is working on that capability. If it does, then MusicRoom will come up against heavyweights like Google Music.

GoMo News can run that app but only because we pretended to have a US mobile phone.

What do you get if you pay the $4.99 for the full edition? Well, the free version only plays the first three tracks in each folder. A bigger disadvantage is that the shuffle facility doesn’t work in the free edition.

Why would you want to use shuffle? Well, via the BlackBerry’s audio jack you could plug your handset into your hi-fi (music centre) system. Then there would be no need for a party tape.

The QR code to download the Free edition of MusicRoom is displayed below. If you don’t have a QR code reader loaded on your BlackBerry, use the QR code scanning capability built into BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).