I am down in Alicante at the moment working on a new project; it is nice to be near to the beach having plenty of sun instead of the current downpours and cold that we have been having in Madrid.  Yes I know that summer in Madrid will be just as nice but it has not arrived yet!

As a big music fan I never travel without my MP3 player as plane/train trips can be exceedingly tedious, this time I chose to take the train as I am not a fan of air travel and the train system in Spain works really well.  About 5 years ago I bought myself a 10Gb iPod which I hate with a passion, it is just wretched.  The interface is clunky, it requires FireWire for transferring music, it only works with the despisable iTunes (until I discovered the Winamp plugin), and in general is a dreadfully horrible thing to have to carry around.  Why have I not replaced it for a cool Zune?  Simple, it cost me so much money that I refuse to buy something else until it breaks and also the Zune is not currently available in Europe.

As I tend to play my music far too loud for my own safety I never ever hear my phone ring, which is a bummer when travelling as any contact with home is always welcome.  Today I hit on the idea of trying out my Windows Mobile as a short-term replacement for my iPod.  I say short-term because I only have a 2GB memory card in my mobile and I have more than 2GB's of music in my iPod.  So if I have a trip to make, and I have my laptop with me to change the songs, the perhaps my phone will make an ideal substitute.  The added benefit is that I will always know when my phone rings if I am listening to music as it is the same device!

My first problem was one of how to get the songs into the phone.  I could just copy them over, but in order to save space (at the expense of quality) I wanted to convert them to a lower bitrate because with headphones on a noisy plane/train I would not be able to notice to drop in audio quality.  I decided that the best choice would be to convert the MP3s over to WMA format at 64k bitrate, which is quite a drop in quality but I know that the WMA format is superior to MP3 so the drop should not be too noticeable.   Windows Media Player has an option to sync songs with a device, and during the sync process it will convert the songs to WMA format at my desired bitrate.

image The options to change the bitrate of songs during the transfer.

I set up the sync options (as you can see in the screen above) and chose the songs I wanted to sync and hit the Sync button.  To my surprise, within about 90 seconds Windows Media Player had converted and copied over 300mb of songs to my phone; afterwards I copied a song from the phone back to my computer in order to see how the audio quality compared.  With the big drop in bitrate the change is noticeable when played through speakers or decent headphones, the audio losses it's clarity a bit.  However, when played through those horrible in-the-ear headphones that come with mobile phones it is almost impossible to notice any difference in quality, particularly if there is background noise, such as aircraft engines.

I have now synchronised 1Gb of music to my phone ready for my train ride back to Madrid next Friday!

 image  A screenshot of the conversion and synchronisation process running.

In conclusion, using Windows Media Player to convert and sync my music files is surprisingly fast and painless, it could not have been made any easier; you simply select the songs you want to add from your music library and drag them over to the device.  Of course, if you have the space in your device, there is no point converting your music to any other format apart from the one it is already in.  However, this feature of Windows Media Player is worth using if you need to keep an eye on how much space you are going to take up with your music files.