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Before I go any further, you need to understand that
there's nothing magical about 'MP3'. In fact, when people talk about an 'MP3
player', they're often referring to something that plays other digital music
formats. It's just that MP3 is a lowest-common-denominator standard and the
term has rather stuck in the collective consciousness. Anyway, keep an open
mind and read on...
OK, so the Nokia 9500/9300 and P800/P900/P910 and Nokia
6630/6680/6681 (etc.) can play standard 'MP3' stereo music files, probably
downloaded from the Internet. These are usually encoded at 128kbps (their 'data
rate'), which is reckoned to produce 'CD quality' to the average ear,
especially when you consider that you're often listening in the open air or in
a noisy environment. 128kbps works out at around a megabyte per minute, which
means about eight hours worth on a 512MB MMC or two hours worth on a virgin
128MB Memory Stick Duo.
If you haven't yet bought a big expansion card,
try these guys
Rolling your own
Now, it's quite possible to encode your own MP3 files, using a freeware application like CDex,
shown below. This will 'rip' any of your CDs and encode them to any format you
like, including MP3. One of its settings is the data rate that you'd like to
use, e.g. 64kbps. At this rate, half that of the usual 128kbps, you'll fit
twice as much music on your card, at the expense of the music sounding flat and
lacking in higher frequencies. Read on...
A better way
Now, thinking laterally for a moment, what if there was a
better and more efficient coding scheme for digital music than the familiar
MP3? What about 'MP3pro', championed a few years ago but largely ignored by the
world at large. This is better than MP3 at each data rate but MP3pro is heavily
licensed and you have to stump up real money to buy a utility to encode your
files. What about Windows Media Audio (WMA)? This is also far more efficient
than MP3, but is proprietary to Microsoft and you probably won't find Symbian
devices playing it anytime soon... What about AAC, used in encrypted form for
Apple's iTunes? Although AAC itself is an open standard, iTunes files from the
Internet require Apple's decoder, and anyway AAC isn't that much better than
MP3.
And so we come to the current 'best' format, the open
source (i.e. totally free forever) Ogg Vorbis. It's a strange name (to say the
least), but look past that and you'll find CD quality music even at 64kbps.
Which equates to around six hours music on a single P800/P900 128MB Memory
Stick Duo, which is pretty impressive. On a Nokia 9500 with a 1GB MMC, you can
store over 30 hours, or around 45 CDs worth of music, which is definitely
getting into iPod killer territory. And you can get there today, for free.
Getting your music into Ogg Vorbis format
You'll need two piece of software to get going.
CDex, I've already mentioned. This
runs under Windows and includes a good Ogg Vorbis encoder on its Settings
panel. Once set up, you just pop in each of your audio CDs, fill in any track
information (if you don't already have this from the CDDB Internet database),
set the 'Quality' to 64kbps and click on the 'Extract CD tracks to compressed
audio files' button. (If you don't use Windows, there are plenty of free
encoders for Mac and Linux)
You'll end up with a few folders of .ogg files, each
folder named after the album its tracks were culled from.
Ogg Vorbis on the Nokia 9500 and 9300
Just drag and drop these folders onto your Nokia 9500's
memory card in Windows Explorer (using a card reader is best - it's much, much
quicker). For the Nokia 9500, you might as well keep the original folders
intact, as the built-in Music Player application is very much folder-based,
should you want to use this to play the files using the Ogg Vorbis plug-in,
mentioned below.
What you need is the free
OggPlay for Series 80
(i.e. the 9500 and 9300). Once installed, use the 'Find new files' menu option
and you'll be able to browse all tracks in all folders, choosing by artist,
title, etc.
Alternatively, as mentioned above, you can upgrade the
built-in Music Player application to also work with Ogg Vorbis-encoded files.
The Nokia 9500 (like all recent Series 60 smartphones) uses Symbian OS 7, with
its MultiMedia Framework. What this means is that different video and audio
decoders can be 'plugged in', after which they're accessible by any
application. Simply install this plugin [link needed!].
Playing Ogg Vorbis on the Nokia 6630/6680
Just drag and drop these folders onto your Nokia
6630/6680's memory card in Windows Explorer (using a card reader is best - it's
much, much quicker). Download and install the free
OggPlay MMFfor Series 60.
Once installed, use the 'Find new files' menu option and you'll be able to
browse all tracks in all folders, choosing by artist, title, etc.
Playing Ogg Vorbis on the Sony Ericsson P800/P900
Download OggPlay for UIQ. After
installing, tell it to 'Find new files' and it will read the header info in
each .ogg file and set up playlists according to artist, album, title, and so
on. Best of all, you can operate OggPlay in Flip closed mode, just like the
Audio player in later P800 firmware and in the P900.
I recommend setting OggPlay up on the default Flip closed
(centre) position. You can do this in 'Control panel | Flip closed shortcuts',
if you haven't already.
Now, with OggPlay running and your P800 flip closed, Jog
up and Jog Down control volume (although make sure your system multimedia
volume is turned up; it's the volume control icon in your system tray), and jog
forward and backwards skip between tracks in a playlist.
And if you think all this is as cool as I do, consider
making a PayPal donation to the chap who wrote OggPlay. I just did! 8-)
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