Convert iTunes Music Library To A Mobile-Friendly Format.
Audience: For iPod / Windows PC owners with a “smart” mobile (with MMC/SD slot).
Intro:
This is a guide on how to convert your existing (and probably extensive) iTunes music library into a format that you can play from your mobile.
iPod* owners everywhere have probably spent many long laborious hours importing all the albums from their CD collections into the iTunes* music library on their PC.
This is not something you will readily want to repeat from scratch with the Nokia Audio Manager (or equiv.) to get your music accessible from your mobile.
Fortunately, there is an alternative offered through the many different music file conversion utilities available on the 3rd party software market. For the purposes of this guide, we will be using the range of utilties available from dbPowerAMP.com .
First of all, you have to find out what the Target format is for the music files you want to convert.
This willdepend on the type of mobile you own.
.MP3 file format is appropriate for the following mobiles:
Siemens SX1, Siemens SL45, Sharp GX-30, Nokia 6600 (with 3rd party MP3 player), motorola A920/925..
.AAC file format is the preference for the following (although they can all play .MP3 as well):
Nokia 6230, Nokia n-Gage, Nokia 7610, Nokia 3650, Nokia 3300..
.WMA file format is the preference for any of the available windows-based smartphones:
Orange SPV / E200, Motorola mpx200, O2 XDAII..
There are other alternatives like .AMR, and .OGG format (Ogg Vorbis standard), but are less common. (Ogg players are available for the symbian-based mobiles like Nokia 6600, Siemens SX1, Nokia n-Gage ). AMR is a lower quality encoding standard, not likely to satisfy all but the least demanding of music listeners (but it is useful for providing short mono voice recordings on mobiles).
Some mobiles are capable of playing a variety of different music file formats (Nokia 6230 can play .aac, .mp3, .amr)
In this case, if you are not too bothered about the portability aspect of your music, then descending order of preference is probably:
AAC -> WMA -> MP3 -> AMR.
This is because AAC and WMA are both newer compression standards, and so employ a more efficient compression algorithm than MP3, making for smaller files (which means more music on your memory card!). However, if you also want to play your digital music in your car stereo (MP3-CD), in your old MP3 player, and any number of other players, then portability may be more important to you than file size. Then, MP3 may still be the best format for you to convert to.
Fortunately dbPowerAMP Music Converter is capable of converting music files to any of these formats, when combined with the available codecs.