Chapter 13
Singing, Dancing, and Noisemaking
In This Chapter
Playing music
Making playlists
Watching your own movies
Now, I’m not going to try to compare the quality of sound you hear from the tiny speakers on the Tab S2 NOOK — a nevertheless impressive pair of devices about the size of the head of a matchstick — with the sound from a much larger system.
And although the LCD screen of the Tab S2 NOOK is beautifully colorful and quite detailed when you’re looking at it from a distance of a foot away, it doesn’t match the visual thrills of a 90-inch HD screen or the astounding experience at an IMAX theater.
But the Tab S2 NOOK fits in your back pocket or a small purse. And don’t overlook the fact that it can be a source for audio and video when you connect it to a larger system. This chapter looks at playing items from your well-honed, tasteful collection.
Starting with the Hardware
Your tablet has internal and external memory, each of which can store files. Since this is, at heart, a computer, those files are digital representations of sound and imagery: 0s and 1s that can be converted by the microprocessor into music and movies.
You can get files from almost any source, including the NOOK Shop, Google’s Play Music and Movies, Amazon, Apple, YouTube, and other web-based sites.
Or you can stream audio and video, which means that the material doesn’t reside on your tablet but instead arrives from the Internet across a Wi-Fi connection and is immediately played. Music sources include Pandora and Samsung’s own Milk service; many sites provide streaming video of live broadcasting or recorded material.
I discuss Pandora and similar apps online at www.dummies.com/extras/samsunggalaxytabs.
Speaking of Which …
The speakers for the Tab S2 NOOK are on the bottom edge of the tablet. If you place your tablet on its back with the speakers facing you, the sound will be pretty good — not as great as a huge studio monitor, but pretty darn amazing when you consider these little guys are about the size of a match head.
Some users swaddle their tablet in a case, which is very considerate, but do bear in mind that the case might block the speakers as well as the microphone.
Customizing headphones with Adapt Sound
Before I discuss alternatives to the speakers, consider utilities that are part of the Samsung hardware controls and the Android software components. You can use these adjustments to improve — just a little — the depth of the music and certain other effects.
The only way to find out if the app helps your particular pair of ears in your particular listening place is to experiment with the settings. Here’s how:
- From any Home screen, tap the Apps icon and then tap the Settings icon.
- Tap Sounds and Notifications.
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Tap Sound Quality and Effects.
See Figure 13-1.
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Tap Adapt Sound and follow the prompts to change some of the settings.
You’ll hear a clicking noise; you’re supposed to wait for a faint beep. The beeps vary in frequency from high to low and shift from ear to ear.
- Tap Yes if you can hear the tone.
Figure 13-1: Install a pair of headphones by connecting them to the jack on the bottom edge of the tablet and turning on the Adapt Sound utility. Listen for the faint beep and then customize the sound.
In Figure 13-2 you can see my results; as if I needed proof, my old-school (and just plain old) ears are deficient in hearing high frequencies. The adaptation improved the sound quality a smidge.
Figure 13-2: After running the utility, the tablet adjusted for the fall-off in high-frequency perception that comes with age (and wisdom).
As I say — Can you hear me now? — experiment with any and all of the settings to find the one best for you. And don’t forget that the quality of your headphones and the amount of ambient noise in the room will have an impact on your aural experience.
SoundAlive + and Tube Amp
On the same Sound Quality page of settings, use slide switches to turn on one (or both) special adjustments that may improve the quality of sound:
- SoundAlive + uses some fancy programming to simulate the effect of surround sound, seemingly bending sound so that it doesn’t come directly at you but also from the side and even behind you. It’s a magic trick nicely done. Experiment to see if it improves your experience.
- Tube Amp is a back-to-the-future utility that claims to soften the sound of digitally derived music (made up of discrete 0s and 1s in a file) to seem closer to the old-fashioned analog sound of a tube amplifier. Again, try it; you might like it, or you might not notice the difference.
An equalizer for ultimate customization
The basic equalizer (confusingly called SoundAlive without the +) has a cousin, the graphic equalizer. You can find these on your music collection’s playback panel. I discuss those in a moment in the section on playing music from your tablet.
Alternatives to Built-In Speakers
In addition to the built-in speakers of the Tab S2 NOOK, you have several ways to go outside the box:
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Headphones. The 3.5 mm headphone jack on the bottom edge of the tablet (between the speakers) can connect to earphones or a headset, which greatly improves the quality — at least for the one person who can use it. (You can buy a splitter so two people can connect headphones to a single tablet, and boy does that ever look geeky. But it works.)
There’s a wide variety of quality in headphones. Basic ones use the signal straight out of the tablet, but more advanced (and more expensive) models include a built-in battery-powered amplifier that boosts the signal, especially when it comes to booming bass.
- Connect to speakers via cable. You can use the same headphone jack with a cable to connect to a set of larger external speakers; most of these have a built-in amplifier that improves the quality. These need battery or AC power.
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Connect to a home stereo system via cable. You can connect a cable to the headphone jack and go from there to a home stereo system, which can significantly boost the output wattage (and add all sorts of adjustment options, including knobs to individually control treble, midrange, and bass signals). My home stereo system includes left and right speakers plus a subwoofer that sits on the floor and produces a bass deep enough to be felt miles away if I were so inclined.
As it happens, my car’s stereo can accept audio through a jack on the dashboard; it was necessary to invest in a male-to-male cable with 3.5 mm connectors at each end. You can find cables online if you know exactly what you’re looking for, or you can visit a home electronics dealer. The cable shouldn’t cost more than the price of a candy bar, an internationally accepted means of comparison that I invented.
If you’re hooking up to a sound system, the end of the cable that connects to the Tab S2 NOOK must be a 3.5 mm stereo plug; there are half a dozen or so possibilities for the design of the plug at the other end, including RCA, quarter-inch, bare wire, and more. Use your Tab S2 NOOK to take a picture of the connectors on your stereo system. Take the tablet with you to the store when you go shopping for cables. - Connect to speakers via Bluetooth. You can buy amplified speakers that communicate with your tablet using Bluetooth radio signals. If you choose this route, I recommend buying a system that includes a subwoofer, which is an additional speaker devoted entirely to producing deep bass tones.
Jamming Out on Your Tab 4 NOOK
In this age of fancy and sometimes cryptic names for utilities and apps (Why is Samsung’s streaming music app called Milk?), it’s refreshing to come across some software components that tell you the unvarnished truth in their name. Android gets pretty close to that with its elegantly titled Music Player.
You’ll find Music Player in the Apps collection or, if you’ve created a shortcut to it, on one of the Home screens. Tap the icon and prepare to groove. (Why do we say groove when we mean enjoy some music? Because in ancient times, recorded music came on rotating wax and then acetate disks with grooves that contained wiggles that vibrated a needle that converted those markings into sound. Trust me; I was there.)
When you open Music Player, you’ll see a screen like the one in Figure 13-3. Tap any of the tabs at the top of the screen to see its contents:
- Playlists
- Tracks
- Albums
- Artists
- Folders
Figure 13-3: This playlist is one I use at the end of the day as I struggle to avoid falling asleep at the keyboard. The tabs at the top of the screen are key to organizing your collection.
The information varies depending on how you got the music on your tablet and where you stored the files.
Pressing Play
You probably know how to play a track. Okay, if you insist: To play a song, tap any tab or playlist. Then tap the name of a song or artist. Playback is almost instantaneous. No need to wait for the needle to find the right groove, or a CD player to find the chosen track.
- You’ll see the name of the current track near the bottom of the screen. If you bought the track from certain music services, or if the NOOK or another computer device has gone out on the Internet to find information about the music, you may see an image of the artist or the album cover.
- Along the right edge of the Music Player control at the bottom is a volume control, presented as a vertical gauge. The higher up the gauge, the higher the volume. You can adjust the volume by tapping the Volume icon, or by pressing the Volume + or Volume – key on the side of the tablet.
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Near the bottom of the screen is a horizontal bar that shows you how far along you are in the current track. At the left side of the bar you’ll see how many minutes and seconds have elapsed; at the right end of the bar you can see the total length of the track.
You can touch and hold the current playback position and drag it back to an earlier part of the music, or drag it forward to advance.
- You can probably handle it from here:
- Tap Play to begin the music; tap again to pause the track.
- Tap the Rewind icon to move to the previous song in your collection.
- Tap the Fast Forward icon to skip from the current track to the next one waiting.
- Tap the Shuffle icon to skip hither and thon through all the tracks in the current playlist. When enabled, the Shuffle icon shows a criss-crossing set of right-facing arrows. Tap it again to turn off Shuffle. When Shuffle is turned off, there’s a slash through the arrows.
Playing favorites or adding to a playlist
To create a subset of your favorite tracks, do this. (If they’re not your favorites, why are they occupying space within your tablet?)
- With the Music Player displayed, tap the More button at upper right.
- Tap Edit.
- Tap to place a checkmark next to any track you want as a favorite.
- Tap More again.
- Tap Add to Favorites (or Add to Playlist).
Now when you load the Music Player, you can play just your favorites or just the ones in a particular playlist.
SoundAlive equalizer and settings
With the music playlist displayed, tap the More button in the upper right to see more settings.
Tap SoundAlive to view a set of dials that look more or less the ones you used to see on an old stereo system. See Figure 13-4.
- Touch the blue dot on the upper dial and rotate clockwise to increase the bias of the sound toward treble (away from bass). Experiment with the dial as needed, and remember: Not every song will have the same sound, and different rooms have differing acoustic environments. (A carpeted living room will absorb and muffle sound and benefit from a boost in treble, while a hardwood kitchen floor will sound sharper and may need a turn toward bass.)
- The lower dial is boosts or deemphasizes the midrange of sound, the area where voice (vocals) take root in a song. Try the dial in each direction.
Figure 13-4: Touch and move the blue dot to adjust the bias toward treble or bass, or to emphasize or deemphasize vocals or instrumentals.
To adjust the sound range graphically, tap the Details button near the top of the screen. Figure 13-5 shows what you’ll see.
Figure 13-5: The graph shows emphasis or reduction of frequencies ranging from low (bass) at the left to high at the right. You can adjust the settings for each frequency or use presets for music styles.
What you see here is a scale that’s neutral in the middle (at 0dB) and adjustable 10dB up or 10dB down for each of seven audio frequency ranges. Let me break that down: 60, at the left end of the scale, means 60 Hertz or 60Hz in technospeak, which is a deep bass sound. At the other end of the scale is 16K, which means 16,000Hz, up around the sound of a dog whistle. The typical adult male’s voice is in the range of 85 to 180 Hz, and a typical adult female from 165 to 255 Hz. A young adult can be expected to hear sounds in the range from about 20Hz to 20,000Hz, with the upper limit declining with age.
And one last definition: the adjustment called dB, meaning decibel. (The bel part comes from Alexander Graham Bell, by the way.) It is a logarithmic scale for power, but when it comes to volume the difference between 0 and +10dB is about three times the amplitude. Going the other direction, from 0 to -10dB reduces a particular frequency to one-third the volume.
Touch and drag any or all of the buttons on the graphic equalizer to see the effect, or try one of the presets at the bottom of the screen. There’s no right or wrong setting here: Choose the one that sounds the best to you.
Play speed
Try this one with your old record player: You can play a track at double speed or half speed. Disappointingly, you cannot, as Joan Baez once sang, “play me backwards.”
- From the Music Player, touch the More button in the upper-right corner, and then tap Settings.
- Tap Play Speed.
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Move the slider.
Move it to the right to play a track at double speed, or all the way to the left to play at half speed.
The magic trick here is that the frequencies of the human voice are electronically almost unchanged, even as the rest of the music is altered. See Figure 13-6.
Figure 13-6: The tablet does a pretty good job of maintaining the frequency for the human voice, making this an interesting tool for listening to podcasts. You can also make your own Chipmunks music.
Why would you want to use the Play Speed feature? Suppose you have a lecture in a file or a podcast; you can speed up or slow down the track without changing the voice very much.
Other settings
Tap Music Auto Off in Settings to enable a timer that shuts off the music player after a specified period of time. You can choose from five preset times or select Custom. You can play yourself to sleep or use your music system as a timer while you exercise or eat or whatever you might choose to do.
Turn on Smart Volume to automatically adjust each track to an equal level.
If you press the Home key to go to another app, music keeps playing. A Play icon stays in the notification panel at the top to remind you that the Music Player’s active. Swipe down from the top to see a mini control panel for music. Tapping the X closes the Music Player without you having to go back to the app.
How about a nice piece of music to play while you’re reading a book? No problem. Unless you tap Pause or reach the end of your playlist, the Music Player will keep singing to you.
Press the Volume key to raise or lower the sound. The end of the switch nearer the Samsung logo on the tablet is + (up); the other end is – (down).
Deleting a song
I almost never delete a track of music, because I am a multifaceted guy. As I write these words, I’m listening to a 1966 recording of Grace Slick singing “Sally Go Round the Roses” with her original hippie-dippie group The Great Society. Later, I may feel in the mood for Bob Marley, and tonight as I wrap up a long, long day in your service I may close out the night with Rachmaninoff’s “Caprice Bohémien.” Into which category would you put that particular mix?
But if you insist on removing a track, here’s how:
- Open the Music Player app.
- Tap More.
- Tap Edit.
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Tap to place a checkmark next any track you want to delete.
If you want to delete a song from your tablet, don’t just remove it from a playlist. That just takes it out of the list. It doesn’t take it off the tablet.
- Tap the Delete button that has appeared alongside More at the top of the screen.
A deleted song is gone. If you have another copy on a computer or another tablet, it won’t be deleted from there.
Showing Your Own Movies
We all aspire to be the next Alfred Hitchcock or Martin Scorsese, but I suspect we’re all much closer to Ed Wood, who’s on most film critics’ and fans’ list of the worst director ever to have a career in Hollywood. Check out Glen or Glenda or Plan 9 from Outer Space. Wow, they just don’t make them like that anymore. His stuff was so bad it became must-see material.
Of course, I’m sure your productions are very much worthy of an Academy Award if only you could get someone to sit down and watch them. And pay you for the privilege. But one of the beauties of digital cameras is that you don’t need tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a picture or a movie. And the magic of digital video means you can point, shoot, and immediately see your work. This chapter deals with video you’ve made for yourself, using the built-in video camera of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 NOOK.
When you buy through the NOOK Shop, the Google Play Store, Amazon, Apple, and most other sources, you play the movie using a simple interface that has Play, Pause, Rewind, and Fast Forward.
Movies that you record with the video camera are stored in the MP4 file format. That’s not something you have to bother with, except if you want to import another video from a computer or other source; MP4 is the preferred format, although the tablet should handle most videos encoded in 3GP, WMV, AVI, and a few other formats.
I say the tablet should be able to work with other formats because it might balk at files that stray even a tiny bit away from certain formats. You can find some conversion utilities on the Internet that are pretty good at fixing certain deficiencies.
Loading a video
Playing a video that you made with your Tab S2 NOOK is exactly this easy: Find the file, tap the Play icon, sit back (not too far), and watch. It’s so easy that Samsung and Google have dotted the Home and the App screens with multiple onramps to the movie screen.
The playback screen for a video is remarkably similar to the one for music. See Figure 13-7.
Figure 13-7: I just got back from shooting a quick movie. Just for giggles, I applied the cartoon special effect. Here you can see the Play, Rewind, Fast Forward, and More buttons.
Using the Gallery to play videos
Here’s how to start in the Gallery, which has all your photographs and videos:
- In the Apps collection, tap the Gallery icon.
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Tap the folder called Camera.
Photographs are thumbnails (small pictures). Video files look similar, but have a large Play icon on them.
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Tap the Play icon.
The video enlarges to fill the screen.
- Tap it one more time to start the video.
Using MyFiles to play videos
You can get to videos from the MyFiles app, which is similar to Windows Explorer on a PC and the Finder on a Mac machine.
- From any Home screen, tap MyFiles.
- Tap the Videos tab on the left side.
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Tap the filename for any video you see listed in the right panel.
See Figure 13-8.
Figure 13-8: You can start videos from MyFiles. If you touch the More button (upper right), you can move, copy, or rename any video file displayed here.
The first time you watch a video from the Gallery, you may be offered a choice of players: the Video Player or Photos. You can choose one and then tap Always to make that a permanent assignment. If you tap Just Once, you see the same message the next time you play a video from the Gallery.
Both Video Player and Photos apps work fine. Both have a basic Trim tool that allows you to choose a starting and ending point for the video. They also have a Details option, which tells you the file’s size, resolution, and duration. You can also export your video to a personal computer and use a more full-featured editor to create your own blockbuster.
Video Player has a few extra options, including grayscale, blur, invert (a negative image), sepia, and sharpening of the file. See Figure 13-9.
Figure 13-9: I applied a sepia tone to my video tour of the sand-covered lane near my home. The Trim button allows you to cut out and save a section.
Using the Video app
With this app, there’s no need to choose a folder.
- Tap the video’s filename or thumbnail.
- From the Video app, you can tap the Folder icon to look for a specific video.
- Tap the Search (magnifying glass) icon in the Video app and type a search term.
You can play a video from the Camera and Photos apps.
Managing your videos
You can cut away unwanted parts of a video at its beginning or end using the Trim tool; I explain how in Chapter 12. But to tell you the truth, and I always do, the apps on your Tab S2 NOOK for video aren’t all that helpful for anything other than playing them back.
If you want to do some video editing, including cutting, special effects, and sound, transfer the file to a desktop or personal computer and use the software there.
You can share the file with many services and apps, even while you’re watching. Tap the Share icon on the screen or do this:
- Tap the Play icon to pause.
- Tap the Menu (three stacked lines) icon.
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Choose Share.
Depending on how your tablet is set up and which apps you have, you might be able to send the file by Bluetooth, add it to Dropbox, OneDrive, or another cloud-based storage, or send it as an email or Gmail.
The Play Movies & TV store has current titles (many sold in either SD, standard definition, or higher-priced HD, high definition). If you’re only going to view the video on your Tab 4 NOOK, you might want to buy the SD version; on your tablet’s small screen, the difference in resolution may not be noticeable.
You can also rent certain titles at a lower cost. Again, SD and HD versions are available. The amount of time and the conditions of rental can vary from studio to studio, so be sure to read the fine print before tapping Buy. Play Movies & TV has films, individual television shows, and entire seasons for sale or rent.
Also available through the Play Store are games, apps, magazines, and newspapers. Prices for some magazines and newspapers are quite reasonable — well below what you’d pay at a real newsstand. If you can find one.
Payment for items purchased from the Play Store can be by credit or debit card or through PayPal.
Samsung has free apps in the Galaxy Apps panel that appears on the Home screen of your Tab 4 NOOK tablet.