MP3 music on palm?

R

Road Hammer

New member
My friend has a 256 MB MP3 player and he can store 5000 songs while I bought a 256 MB san disk card for my T3 and it can only store about 50 songs!
Can you suggest me how I can increase the number or songs stored?

'Thanks
 
I don't believe that your friend can really hold over 5000 songs on 256 MB.

The MP3 Player your friend bought - that can hold a 256 MB Card - by any chance - does it *also* have a hard drive that he forgot to tell you about?

My point here - the more songs you cram onto any given memory space - the lower the quality.

Taken further - 5,000 songs into 256 MB would be like 20 songs per megabyte - or approximately 50K per song. - That's ok for a Midi file, but not an MP3

Hope this helps.
 
I agree with allgire. I mean, lets say an average song is 4 minutes, and the minimum quality I'd use would be 64Kbps OGG vorbis. That's 2MB per song, which would be around 125 songs on a 256MB card.
50 songs is a fair amount to expect with mp3, maybe 100 with ogg vorbis. If you want to convert your Mp3s to ogg vorbis, then you may be happy with 64Kbps (quality setting 0) oggs, which is half of a 128Kbps mp3, which would double the amount of music you could have.
Take a trip here:
http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/
and get the brilliant free software CDex. It is best used to get your oggs ripped directly from CD (much better that converting from MP3), but if you don't want to do that, it has a convert function which will allow you to convert a folder of mp3s to ogg vorbis.
It's fairly straightforward but I can describe the process in more detail if you wish.
iiicRuled.
P.S. Aeroplayer and PocketTunes will both play ogg vorbis files for free. The Mp3 plugins cost money though on both of these.
 
I have recently been downloading (via a legal website- www.archive.com) some music and putting it on a 256 mb sd card. I find that music is about 1 mb per minute of music. For example, a single Grateful Dead Concert usually fills a 256mb card. I cannot really evaluate by the song as I listen to longer pieces. I agree that your friend likely has some type of hard drive on his or her machine. I have been intrigued by Apple's 40 gb iPod. However, the device is $400. I could get most of my library on this. Currently, I listen, delete and download something else. I also note that the palm can only play up to a certain volume. It is not great on the street but is really cool in quieter places.
 
No, I'm afraid RealPlayer won't play the oggs. But AeroPlayer www.aerodromesoftware.com will do so for free (you only have to pay if you want mp3 in aerplayer). You will find Aeroplayer much more advanced in terms of features etc, than real player, so give it a try.
iiicRuled
 
Just thought you my be inerested to know that the smaller the music file is (in memory not length) the less battery power it will take p. So by using smaller formats you can save your batteries. PS some music, low quality is acceptable (rap/ bad rock) ;)
 
Hmmm.

A smaller sized music file, residing on RAM, would use less power to store I suppose. But these are Palms- we store all our music on SD's- it's very hard to get them on RAM. The file size on SD wouldn't use any different amount of power...

A lower bitrate music file could take less power to decode. E.g. a 192Kbps mp3 would use more than 128Kbps mp3. But when referring to lower bitrates, I presume you mean different formats... A 64Kbps Ogg file would not necessarily take less power to decode than a 128Kbps mp3, in fact it would likely take more.....

Or is there something I've missed?
 
You missed the fact that reading an SD card takes power. BTW, before your music is played, a small portion of it resides on RAM. That is why if in the middle of a song you remove the memory card it takes a second for the PDA to stop playing.

The less reading your device (mp3 players too) has to do te less power it takes.

O yeah, RAM full or near empty takes the same amount of power to keep it going.
 
Good point. Thanks for clarifying. I was thinking along the lines of power from processing....
But still, playing a 64Kbps Ogg, would I pretty sure, use more power than playing a 128Kbps Mp3 overall, because of the increased processing required to decode ogg. But if you're talking about same formats at lower bitrates then yes i can see now how it would take less power.
Cheers
 
I'm pretty sure that all proccesors are going at 100% all of the time. Any excess is used as "System Idle Procces" Therefor your thinking still seems flawed to me.
John
 
Are you saying that when you watch movies on your Palm, the battery last as long as when you are reading an e-book? Because my Palm doesn't!!

If you use MMPlayer (only works in older versions), you will see something call "idle ticks". Basically, when the processor is being used, it runs at full speed. (unless you undeclock). But it will decode a chunk and then play it back, like using a buffer. The idle ticks in MMPlayer are when the processor is resting. I'm pretty sure the other music players work in the same way.
A 128Kbps Mp3 would take say less power to decode than a 128Kbps Ogg. When the processor is running, it runs at the same speed, but it needs to run for less time to decode each "chunk" with mp3 than ogg, or it needs to run less frequently with mp3 than ogg.
You thoughts on the System Idle Process are probably correct for desktop computers, but mobile chips have to save power. I'm pretty sure the way mobile chips are made mean that when they are idle, they are not drawing power.
iiicRuled
 
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