One of the advantages of using an N series phone as your portable music player is the support for a wide range of music formats. All modern N series phones support the eAAC+, which is a great format for providing high quality music at very low bitrates. This is in addition to MP3, AAC, WMA and real formats which are also supported by N Series phones. For most people, a 56 kbps Parametric Stereo encoded eAAC+ audio file sounds the same as a 128 kbps mp3 file. That means your 8 GB N95/N91/N81 phone is equivalent to a 16 GB iPod in terms of storage capacity.
Now, how to convert your music library to eAAC+ format? The Nokia provided Music manager can convert music to “mobile optimized” format, which is nothing but eAAC+. But the quality of the codec is not upto the mark. Music files encoded using this tool did not sound very nice and sometimes even had artifacts. In general, it is not a good practice to convert source music files which are encoded at less than 192 Kbps to advanced AAC Plus. Ideally, you should rerip your CDs to eAAC+ at 56 Kbps with Parametric Stereo option. This will give you the best listening experience.
The best conversion tool which provided excellent music quality is Poikosoft’s Easy CD-DA Extractor. Easy CD DA extractor is not free- it will cost you about $32, but there is a trial version available. The following procedure tells you how to convert our MP3 music to eAAC+ format.
Open Easy CD-DA Extractor and select the “Audio File Format Converter” tab. Drag and drop the music you want to convert into the “Drag audio files here” area. In the output tab at the bottom, select the output format as .aac (eAAC+) and the bitrate as 56 Kbps Parametric stereo. It is not advisable to go to a lower bitrate than this, as you will be able to notice the degradation in audio quality. To know more about Parametric Stereo, follow this Wikipedia link. Once you have dropped all the files that need to be converted, click on the big button at the bottom right to start the conversion process. It takes a while depending upon the number of songs you have selected. Once it is done, you can copy the music in USB mode to your phone. Note that N70 and N72 do not support the eAAC+ format. A 4 MB mp3 file converted using this method will usually be about 1.4 to 2 MB in size!! Go ahead and start enjoying more music on your N95 8GB!
Summary
- Always use source mp3/WMA with bitrate higher than 192 kbps.
- Don’t use the Nokia Audio Manager.
- If possible, rerip your original CDs to eAAC+. You can use Easy CD DA Extractor to do the same.
- The best bitrate setting without degradation in audio quality is 56 Kbps PS. It sounds better than eAAC+ 64kbps without PS as encoded by Nokia Music manager.
(I am not affiliated to Poikosoft in anyway)
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
That was a useful tip. But do you know any free software for the same? I dont want to pay another 30 bucks for reencoding my songs.
If you have Nero cd burning suite installed, there is an application that can encode to eAAC+. Mac users can try this. It is compiled from the official reference encoder code.
The free version of winamp player can do this easily. Check out the demo/some posts in allaboutsymbian.com. I found the quality to be ok.. though I converted it at 48kbps.
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