Podcasts and Audio on my Nokia 9500
One of the projects I’ve been meaning to get to is to reduce the size of my MP3s that I load onto my Nokia 9500 so I can shove a few more songs on the MMC. While the 192kbit MP3 files I encoded in iTunes sounded really good, they’re kind of space hogs on a 1GB MMC.
Meanwhile, another problem that has been annoying me from day one: the built-in audio player doesn’t properly handle large MP3 files. Some of the podcasts I listen to are longer than about 70 minutes. While it will actually play the file to end if you let it, seeking in the file past the 70 minute mark quite simply doesn’t work. Rather, it works, but it “rolls over” and seeks back to the beginning of the file.
The first problem I am solving by converting my MP3 files to OGG files, which is both an open format (i.e. doesn’t have the same licensing issues as MP3) and seems to generate smaller files. I am using a combination of a “find” and a “sox” command on Linux to convert the MP3 files to OGG format automatically. On the few that I’ve checked out so far, it seems to have done a fairly good job. Audio quality is just as good. How do you play OGGs on a Nokia 9500? You can either get the OGG Vorbis plugin for the built-in Audio Player or you can use Symbian OggPlay.
The second problem has been a tougher nut to crack. OggPlay seems to suffer from the same problem with seeking in large files as the built-in audio player. However, Mp3Player seems to handle this just fine. However, the Mp3Player program doesn’t seem to support OGG files.
Oh well I guess I can just use two different programs: one to listen to podcasts and another to listen to music. It’s not like I do both at the same time. 
