N82 Tips: Getting The Most Out Of Your Music Player

I got an email just the other day from a reader named Alec that wanted to share with all of you a huge guide he wrote about "Getting The Most Out Of Your Music Player". It's a great article for those who love to use their N82 as a dedicated mp3 player like myself.

In this guide Alec will show you how to manage volume settings, tags, music conversion, playlists, and trouble shooting on your Nokia N82. Of course this guide works for any Nseries (and Eseries) device including the N81, N95, and E71.

Keep reading to learn how to take full advantage of your music player...

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Getting my brand new, shiny N82, I was excited to finally be able to load all of my music onto my phone (with a relatively inexpensive 8GB microSDHC card).

The only problem was that there was little to no documentation on the best way to do this and, unfortunately, I've faced endless amounts of googling and forum trawling before getting my phone set up just how I want for music, so I thought I'd write a guide.

This guide assumes that your phone is attached in "mass storage" mode throughout. It's possible to do this process connected as a media player and syncing it with a media player, but I prefer the flexibility offered by mass storage mode. It's a personal thing, though, and not all things in the guide require mass store mode connection.

Optional
If, like me, you're too lazy to continually change the volume of your music, you may want to consider normalising it, which cannot be done once it's in m4a format (as far as I'm aware). If you want to do this, you'll have to normalise it before you convert. A great tool to use is MP3Gain, which allows you to normalise your entire library with a single number of clicks, or you can normalise them within folders to maintain relative volume (ie on an album, to preserve dynamic range). I won't go into too much detail, as there are already plenty of tutorials on MP3Gain already (Google it).

Music Conversion
The great thing about the N82 (as well as the N95 and all similar phones) is the support for eAAC+ (or AAC-HEv2), which is a form of compression for music, which can dramatically reduce the size of your library, with less compromise over quality than with MP3.

Of course, everyone's ear for music quality is different and some audiophiles might shudder at the idea of using such lossy formats, but I've found bitrates as low as ~32kpbs to be "fair" quality, especially since I wanted to save space on my memory card for maps, photos and videos. Before you convert your entire music collection, I'd recommend playing around with your settings first on a single audio file and comparing different bit rates to decide between quality and compression.

For the conversion process, I used dBpowerAmp with the Nero AAC Codec. To get this working properly, you'll have to move the downloaded files into:

C:\Program Files\Illustrate\dBpowerAmp\encoder\

or wherever you installed dBpowerAmp.
There are alternatives, like WinAmp, but I've no experience with the program.

I opened up dBpowerAmp Batch Converter and selected my music folder. Hitting "convert". This brings up the settings window.

Hit the "Converting to:" dropdown and select "m4a Nero (AAC)". The bit rate settings are up to you, but I chose VBR at quality ".15" (~32kbps). If you want better quality, go for ".25" (~64kbps). I've read that a good bitrate to use is around 48kbps, so if you want this sort of quality, hit the ABR radio button and adjust the slider accordingly.

On the "Encoder>>" button, you may want to check that the program has located your Nero AAC codec. If not, you should point it to where it is with "Locate Encoder". Then, from the drop-down menu next to the "Encoder>>" button, select "Force HE v2" to use the eAAC+ encoding (which it should do automatically at low bitrates, but we just want to be sure).

Finally, select your output folder, hit convert and you're away!

To give you some idea of numbers, when my collection was in MP3 format, it occupied 16.10GB (at 8days, 10hrs running time). In .15 quality eAAC+, the whole thing fit in 3.2GB.
The conversion process was a lengthy one, which ran for about 20hrs, so make sure you get your settings right first time.

Tags
The built in S60 music player is very nice and, in a couple of ways, superior to an iPod. The music player deals with tags, album art and m3u playlists. Not to mention I now couldn't imagine living without the ability to just type in a search and have the results pop right up.

Thankfully, dBpowerAmp preserves your MP3 tags when it converts to m4a. However, it loses any ratings you may have given your library, which, in a library of over 3000 songs, is a royal pain in the arse. I did find a (complex) solution, but I shan't post that unless requested.

If you do need to adjust your tags after conversion, don't rely on Windows Media Player (though I'm sure you've all left this program for some time) or, surprisingly, MediaMonkey (which doesn't seem to read my m4a tags properly - I never found a solution). Other solutions include, again, WinAmp, the context menu that comes with dBpowerAmp, or what I used: MP3Tag, which reads and writes the tags perfectly and can even query freedb and amazon.com for tags and cover art (though not as easily as mediamonkey). However, I'd definitely recommend getting your tags sorted before you convert, so that you can use tools like MediaMonkey.

Playlists
The music player supports m3u playlists, which is great. You can import your m4a library into your favourite music manager (in this case, I did use MediaMonkey, because you can view a library on a particular device and also because of its playlist management). Build a playlist from your tracks and then export this as an m3u playlist. You can export dynamic playlists as m3u, but I haven't yet found a way of adding custom dynamic playlists to the phone besides the 3 preloaded ones.

Save the playlist in the root of your memory card.

You might want to check the playlist in a document-viewer, like MS Word (or even just wordpad) to see that all the paths are relative (ie, they are not preceded with a drive letter), so that the playlist works properly on your phone. If there is a drive letter, it's a simple case of "Find & Replace", where you find "F:\" and replace with "".

Troubleshooting
In order to get all your music and playlists to show up properly in your library, you'll have to refresh it. This is done by opening:

Music Player -> Options -> Refresh

This will take a (long) while depending on how much music you've crammed onto your phone, so just leave it to do its thing and it'll beep at you when it's done.

Important: If you delete a file off your memory card, you'll have to delete it within the library also, or you won't be able to refresh.

A great tip I also found is that if your library isn't refreshing, you can delete your library and rebuild it. Just delete these files:

e:\private\101FFC31\mpxv1.mpd
e:\private\101FFC31\pcv5.mpd
e:\private\101ffca9\harvesterdb.dat

You'll have to refresh your library again.

Finally
Hit play.

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Thanks Alec for sharing this great tutorial.