Hi,

 Sorry if this has been discussed before - I'm new to all this - but I recently boaught a 2GB card for my Nokia 6230i and am very pleased with its capacity. I've got nearly 50 albums on it. The only problem is it now takes six and a half minutes for the media player to start up. Which is ridiculous.

 I know the media player defaults to reading 'All Tracks' before allowing you to select the  individual playlist you want to listen to. But is there some way to speed up this process? I know other phones don't take this long to 'load up' - even with 1 and 2GB cards.

 And if it the loading process can't be sped up - does anyone know if Nokia is looking into getting this fixed for their next 6230 phone? Its such a good phone apart form this glaringly obvious design flaw...

Xiola,

If you got 50 albums on a 2Gb how come I can only get 12 or so on a 1Gb? How are you ripping and compressing? What programmes are you using? I've followed the Moby instructions for the 6230 and EAC/LAME but end up with - compared to you - huge files.

Many thanks,

Chris

After a quick recount its actually a 'mere' 42 albums on my 2G card. Still more than double yr 12 on the 1G card though...

For ripping etc I just use Freerip. Then I drag the mp3s onto my pen drive and put the 2G card back in my phone.  

Have you tried reformatting your 1G card in a pen drive?

Worked for me...

Hi, I'm new to this as well and have just posted a query. Given the problems I am having getting any music onto my phone at all, I'm amazed at the amount of tracks/albums you all seem to be able to transfer. I must be doing something wrong but have no idea what. I have a 6230i and I noticed the handbook says the phone 'supports MMC cards up to 512 mb' so that's what I got (but the PC Suite doesn't recognise it), so how is it some of you guys are managing to use 1 and 2 g cards in yours? I'd be happy if I could get more than 4 tracks on my phone!

Thanks.

First of all, what bit rate are these MP3's you are adding to your phones?! They must be very high!!

I had a 6230 and a 1gb card in it. I experimented with different bit rates. I wanted to get a bit rate that was good enough quality, but didn't take up the entire memory card. I found that a bit rate of 112 was good enough that you didn't notice the poor quality, but also didn't take up too much room. On my 1gb card at 112 bit rate, I think I managed to get about 25 mp3 albums on there.

MP3's on nokias are not the best format to use, you should use AAC, they take up far less space. Use Nokia PC suite to rip your CD's to AAC and you will be able to fit even more on there. When I converted my albums to AAC I managed to fit 38 albums on my 1gb card.

The sound quality is also very good.

I now have a 6270 with a 2gb card and around 78 albums on there ripped as AAC.

I am not sure why your medie player takes so long to load each time. The refresh all tracks option does take a bit of time, but so long as that is loaded and you don't power your phone off, media player should launch instantly each time on your 6230.

Nokia instruction manuals say that they support cards up to 512mb as that is the largest size they make themselves.

Easty

Hi Easty,

That's really helpful: thank you. One question: I did try Nokia PC Suite for ripping tracks but failed. Now I have a new PC perhaps I shall try again. Does PC Suite download track names etc from the internet (like Freerip does) and install them on the MMC?

many thanks,

Chris

1) Xiola has a problem with the time it takes to load the music player on a 6230i and Easty's answer is that it takes no time at all (on a 6230).  Both are correct: the 6230 loads quickly; the 6230i (the newer and "better" phone) takes an age to load the music player.

2)  I won't advise using .aac on a 6230i.   .aac tracks on a 6230i are prone to skipping (unless this has been corrected in a more recent firmware and you have that more recent firmware).  When I "upgraded" from a 6230 to a 6230i I had to reconvert my music into .mp3 in order to use reliably on a 6230i.

3) Nokia Music Manager (as far I know) doesn't add track information from freedb or elsewhere. That's why I use dbPowerAmp.

Hi Nicholas - that's exactly it. For reasons too boring to go into I often have to turn my mobile off at work. And so when I want to listen to music on the way home I have to remember to switch on the phone 6 minutes before I leave. Obviously this isn't a major problem but it is nonetheless irritating.

Have you worked out a way to speed up the 6230i music player? Do you know if Nokia are going to fix this on their next gen phones?

Apologies I assumed (wrongly) that the 6230i would work much the same as a 6230 did. It seems mad to me that the media player on the 6230i works worse then on an earlier hadset.

Pc Suite does not automatically add track names, which is a bit annoying but I can live with it.

Maybe I will give DBPowerAmp a try. One question, is the compression rate of AAC files on DBPowerAMp as good as it is with Pc Suite?

Hi all,

One old trick that used to work was to rename the .MP3 extension to something else (eg .muz).  This prevented the phone from reading all the tracks the first time you started the music player.

However you would have to make playlists pointing to the files you have renamed and I'm not sure if this would work.  I'll have a try and report back.

I don't see the loading time as being much of a problem as the only time it reads every track is:

1. The first time you start Music Player after the phone has been powered off.

2. When you select the "All Tracks" list.

I very rarely power off my 6230i so the music player always starts instantaneously (providing I've waited the first time from when I switched it on)

I think some of you are making an unfair comparison between the 6230 and the 6230i.  Here's whats happened:

Original and older firmwares (ie below 5.24) on the 6230 ONLY read the root directory of the MMC card for MP3's.  So if you stored your MP3's in sub folders then yes the 6230 would start Music Player more quickly than the 6230i because it was only reading some of the files from the card.

However, firmware 5.24 and above on the Nokia 6230 DOES read sub directories and takes exactly the same time to read a 2GB card as the 6230i does.  You have to remember that it's scanning through around 500 files looking for the artist and title ID3 tags.  In MP3's these can be placed either at the very start of the file OR at the very end of the file.  This means the phone has to search through the entire file to get the information.

I've never actually done a test to see if putting all the track tags at the start of the file makes it load any quicker - might be worth a try.

** EDIT:  Oops - forgot that if you put the ID3 Tags at the end of the file the Nokia 6230i shows them as 3 funny characters - sort of like "yDt" or something so you have to always ensure that the ID3 Tags are at the start of the file **

NiVZ