Just wanted to make a quick post to talk about my new phone, the Nokia 6620 — it’s a smartphone with camera, stereo audio playback and EDGE for pseduo-high speed data.

I’m going to experiment with using it as my day-to-day music player, since it will play back .mp3 and .aac files; however, initially I was saddend to discover that the .aac format it wants is different from those that are generated by iTunes.

More after the click

Nokia’s aac format is a “raw” format, where as iTunes’ aac (.m4a) files are held in a container file — technically they are MPEG-4 files with an audio track which uses AAC compression. The nokia music player wants just the audio track.

There is software that will strip the mpeg-4 container and leave just the audio track. However, there’s an easier alternative:

Rename the file to .mp4! The realplayer on the 6620 at least will recognize this as an audio file and playback just as you’d like it to.

This also has the advantage of allowing you to fast forward and reverse; for some reason that function is disabled on .AAC files.

One drawback is that you will not be able to use the .mp4 tracks as ringtones, as you would .mp3 or .aac.

Now my next step is to create an apple script that will automatically

1) copy a selected playlist to the memory card I use in my phone
2) rename the files to .mp4 if they are currently .m4a
3) create a .m3u playlist of the files that the real player can use.

I’ll also try and figure out a way to alert if any of the files are .m4p — protected iTunes music store files, which are not compatible; I can use a program like hymn to remove the protection from them (or maybe just skip them)!

More on my other recent gadgets soon!