How to: Rip your music CDs to your Eseries communicator
Published by Steve Litchfield at 8:02 BST, August 9th 2006
With the latest wave of S60 smartphones supporting playback of ultra-efficient AAC+ music files, Steve Litchfield explains how to get your music CDs into the right format for playback on your Eseries communicator.
First there was MP3, a basic but clever compression format that enabled digital music files to be passed around the world and stored and played on all manner of portable devices. Then came WMA (proprietary, Windows Media Audio) and Ogg Vorbis (open source, but slightly rarer) and AAC (part of the MPEG family of compression technology), all of which were better at scrunching down your music to fit in a smaller space on the aforesaid devices. Yet most people continued to use MP3. Why?
Mainly because MP3 files were the lowest common denominator, playing on any device, any time. And, at 128kbps (kilobits of data per second of audio) or greater, they didn't sound too bad, especially for rock and pop music. On a 4GB hard disk whizzing round in an iPod or similar, having files take up 1MB for every minute of music wasn't really much of a problem. But start to think of putting digital music on your smartphone, with (say) a 512MB miniSD card. You've got roughly eight hours of music maximum, and that's without anything else on your expansion card. Stick on a navigation application or some games or leave room for 100MB of photos and your mobile music collection starts to feel more and more restrictive. So, why not use one of the newer, more efficient compression systems instead?
Good question. For a number of recent devices (labelled 'XpressMusic'), they've licensed Microsoft's WMA system and have put in place code on the smartphone to integrate with Windows Media Player. Need music on your phone? Just stick a CD in your PC and let Media Player do everything for you. As long as you remember to tweak down the bitrate and uncheck the 'Copy' flag in Media player's settings, you can have great sounding music on your expansion card at two minutes' worth per megabyte, with almost no hassle at all.
For the rest of the S60 3rd Edition smartphones, mainly the Eseries, aimed at 'businesses', things are somewhat bleaker. As I write this, there's no easy way of playing WMA files, Ogg Vorbis (still a weird name) still hasn't got a 3rd Edition player - though it's coming - and Nokia's Music Manager (part of PC Suite) rips CDs to plain AAC (and AAC+/m4a) format but - crucially - without any integration with an online CD database, making it impractical to rip more than one or two CDs (and having to type in hundreds of track names).
It's against this background that Rafe and I determined to find a solution that:
- was as efficient as WMA and Ogg Vorbis
- was as easy to use as Media Player
- was fully S60 3rd Edition compatible
- was free
And, with a little nudge from a certain Florin Lohan at Nokia, we finally found one. Watch Rafe for a more detailed article telling of the different audio possibilities and gotchas we found out along the way, but this tutorial will help you get started and get your music onto your (Eseries) smartphone in a way that fulfills all the criteria above.
Essentially we need to use eAAC Plus (HE-AAC), a much enhanced version of standard AAC that uses more advanced compression techniques. Don't worry too much about the jargon or details, all you need to know is which setting to pick in the Windows software package we found, Winamp 5.24.
Now, there's a Pro version of Winamp and a free version, and the download page (http://www.winamp.com/player/) will have you believe that you need to pay for the Pro version in order to rip CDs to AAC, but it's lying. Click instead on 'Get Basic' and you'll see a more detailed feature chart, showing that HE-AAC encoding is possible with the free version after all. You'll probably want to ignore the 'Bundle' version and the 'Lite' version won't encode, so click on 'Full' to start the download.
When installing Winamp, there are a multitude of install options, with it suggesting all kinds of file associations and extra downloads - whether you accept most of these is up to you and probably depending on how much other music software you've got cluttering up your hard disk!
Once started, click on the top-left icon to bring up Winamp's menu and choose 'Media Library':
Now click on 'Rip' and choose 'CD ripping preferences':
Now comes the vital bit. Set the 'Encoding format' to 'aacPlus (HE-AAC) Encoder v1.2' and the Bitrate to '64kbps' (half the bitrate of MP3 for the same quality, you'll remember):
Click on 'Close'.
You're on the home straight. You can now insert an audio CD, wait for Winamp to get all the track info from the online Gracenote CD database (saving you having to type in track names) and then click on 'Rip' and then 'Rip all'. After ten minutes or so, you'll end up with a new folder in \My Documents\My Music, named with the artist and album title:
When you've done a handful of CDs in this way, it's time for the acid test. Drag and drop all your new music folders over to your smartphone's expansion card using the PC Suite 'Nokia phone browser' (or however you're used to copying files onto your device). Start up 'Music player' on your S60 3rd Edition smartphone and use 'Options > Music library', 'Options > Update Music Library'. You should see all your new CD tracks added and you can then browse through them by album, artist, genre, etc.
One last thing to do: stick your stereo headphones on and enjoy the music. It's free, it's high quality and it only takes up about 25MB of your expansion card per album!
Caveats: Ah yes, there's always got to be a caveat. Winamp appears to have a bug in it whereby some tracks it rips end up with a small audible crackle at the start. How much this annoys you will depend on how much of a purist you are! Your mileage may vary etc.
Steve Litchfield and Rafe Blandford, Aug 2006
PS. The usual disclaimers about not ripping CDs that you don't own apply - we don't advocate piracy in any form....
Categories: How To
Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition