snoyt’s blog

The world is full of mp3 players and many people own and carry them around next to their mobile phone. You can find anything from 1 GB microsized music dice to slimwaisted 160GB iPod-classic's. When only parts of my music collection fits on my phone I find I wanted to play that one number that is missing... But do I really need to lug an 160GB iPod with me for just music? Skip to the How-to to get a quick solution or read the background first for an informed solution.

Mp3 and compression

When mp3-compression became available it was possible to store  high-sound-quality music rather memory efficient (read: affordable) onto your PC for random access and playback. Struggling with bitrates and noisy soundcards it was still largely about: 'because I could'. With increasing cheaper diskspace, better soundcards and compression techniques like AAC, mp3Pro and WMA9 it became more useful and practical. It became practical for me when convergence hit the mobile phone. My trusty SonyEricsson w800i could not only take 2.1MPixels pictures, it could play music. As such it had a cool orange color and sported the Walkman logo...

So several years ago I made the effort of converting all my CD's into 320 kbps mp3 and stored them on my PC. At that time 320 kbps was needed to preserve the quality. Admittedly mp3-codecs were then sufficiently efficient good that 192 kbps might suffice. But in order to recode them later to lower bitrates without irritating recoding errors the bitrate of 320 kbps was a much better choice.

Recent developments into compression formats like AAC, HE-AAC, mpc and Ogg show that at 128 kpbs a perfect sound quality can be achieved. A quality where all sound artifacts are beyond the threshold of human perception. See soundexpert.info's 128 kbps testresults. AAC is doing very well, and it's successor HE-AAC v1 is doing even even better in those results. 64 kbps HE-AAC v1 (aka eAAC) performs close to perfect which is incidently only slightly better than HE-AAC v2 at a lowly 48 kbps, aka eAAC+. Compression formats which the Nokia N95 and many of the NSeries phones support.

Simply explained AAC +SideBandReplication = HE-AAC v1. AAC + SBR + Parametric Stereo = HE-AAC v2 = eAAC+. SBR (sideband replication) is mostly useful upto 128 kbps and PS (parametric stereo) up to 48 kbps. More about it can be found on the Coding Technologies HE-AAC page. In short, above 48 kbps eAAC+ defaults to eAAC encoding and above 128 kbps eAAC+ defaults to AAC encoding.

Accidently, 48 kbps eAAC+ is the default encoding quality of the Nokia Music Manager. This quality is considered by the progam to be good quality and optimal for mobile application. An additonal bonus of the 48 kbps HE-AAC with SBR and PS encoding is that is designed to be very power efficient to decode/play. Better than mp3 or regular AAC. 64 kbps eAAC is considered by the Nokia Music Manager to be excellent quality.

Howto

My collection of mostly 320 kbps encoded mp3's (some are 192 kbps) on my home PC requires about 26 GB of diskspace. Converting it into eAAC+ at 48 kbps reduces it into 4.65 gigabyte. Not bad for 'good' not excellent rated compression. We are talking here about 9 days of contineous music. Add about a 1.5GB for the Maps of USA or either the Europe for Nokia Maps and you have about 1.5 GB left for recording film, photos on a 8GB memory card. Do you want excellent quality nearly indistinguishable from the original? Go 64 kbps if you are a classical music loving audiophile. But otherwise it is not worth it, especially not on your phone.

How to convert? Although Nokia Music Manager can do the encoding for you it does not cope well with encoding my 3000+ music files. It simple crashes at some point. The free version of WinAmp however works great and gives a very nice quality. Nero gives even better encoding results. Simple import your mp3's into the winamp music libary and 'send to' the 'Format Converter'. Select an output folder and the first AAC Plus converter in the list. Next set 48 kbps and parametric stereo. After 24 hours or so it is finnished converting everything on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4.

Audio quality, practical aspects and it's pricetag

An 8 GB microSD card costs about 50 euros and can store about 11 days of music at nearly indistinguishable CD quality in 64 kbps eAAC or 15 days of music if you are happy with a pretty good mobile quality of 48 kbps in eAAC+. In comparison a separate iPod or iTouch with regular AAC at 128 kbps would in comparison require at least 21 GB of diskspace. Neither iPod or iTouch come close into the 50 euros price range. In fact iPod classic prices currently start around 230 euros. Of course a 80 Gigabytes mp3-player is very cheap for that price. But it is way to much for just music.

A good argument might be the sound quality. My N95 has a slight hiss at low volumes, the iPod has a better sound. Well this is true. However a good bluetooth stereo headset can be bought for a mere 50-60 euros. The bluetooth headset has it's own D/A converter and a good one has no background hiss. The additional advantage is that if you buy a bluetooth headset like the Nokia BH-500 with a regular 3.5 mm headphone connector, you can connect any headset you like. You can even connect it to your stereo allowing it to work as a A2DP gateway. Playing music straight from the couch over the stereo. At this point you would still have paid only 110 euros versus a 230 euros for the cheapest iPod classic which has no bluetooth support or a remote controlled headset. Seems to me there is even plenty enough money left to shell out for a spare phone battery of 20 euros ;-)

Currently neither the iPod, the iTouch or the iPhone support any of the better HE-AAC codecs, silly is it not? Particular since Apple put AAC on the consumers map. This year 16GB and 32GB microSD cards are entering the market giving eAAC+ capable phones an even stronger position particular against the iTouch/iPhone in musical terms. Even audiophiles with very large music collections (800+ albums) can carry all their music in their 'pocket' at 128 kbps in top notch HE-AAC. No battery draining streaming, no network load or cost, no ORB or winamp remote required. Just random music access from you on your phone, a properly spelled phone. You see it, don't ya? There is no i in these phones!

P.S. At 3000+ songs the music player starts becomes a bit sluggish when browsing the songlistings. Minor acceptable delays occur when opening the song/artist/album lists.

Update: A comparison of eAAC+ (48 kbps, SBR+PS) and AAC+ (64 kbps, SBR) can been found at the Hydrogen Audio Forums. Particular this result gives a good representation of the practicality of using parametric stereo. It seems a HE-AAC V3 standard with a variable stereo bitrates would be useful to be developped for classical music.

Quietly and without fanfare the N95 has now been around for about a year in most countries. Time to think back and remember last year and ask yourself:

And be completely honest with yourself. Feel free to answer anything as silly as: I wanted the geekiest smartphone on the market. Or I just bought the most expensive one. Or it was monday. Be honest to yourself. Because now you can answer the following question in earnest:

Did it promise every thing I wanted and did it do everything it promised? Never mind those grumpy other people, where you content? With your phone? In the last year we have seen, slider problems, at least 4 firmware updates for the N95 to fix some minor and some glaring bugs. Compared my old mobile phones never needed firmware updates. They worked. Simple.

However the last year we not only got bug fixes, we got added features with the firmware, complimentary software from Nokia. Upgrades. Things like:

• correcting purplish pictures
• fixed hidden network problems (finally)
  
• added demand paging to solve the limited memory
  
• increased phone speed and battery usage
• A-GPS support
• an improved Nokia Maps 2.0 beta
  
• added geo-tagging
• Share Online for blogging
  
• Internet radio
  
• flash-in--web page support.
  
• N-Gage

and so on... A rather new approach for a company, particular Nokia. Nokia's N-series phones seem to get firmware upgrades and software enhancements as much as a Linux OS gets in a year. Better yet, Nokia Beta labs seems to want to track and field test the latest developments for mobile phones. Now a year later I wonder:
.

Is it? Al major bugs solved, all promises fulfilled albeit a bit late? Or is there one missing?

And NO, requests for touchscreen are NOT allowed ;-)

Here are my answers:

• I wanted: 3G, wifi, e-mail, web browsing, GPS with satnav, quality 3+ MPixel photo camera and occasional decent 640x480 video recording. The specs promised all, but did they deliver?
  
• I got last year: Every I wanted and more like SIP, A2DP, uPnP support and reading office documents attached to e-mail. But I also got purplish images, slow GPS-locking and a rather unstable and simple satnav and slider problems. And of course system crashes due to limited memory. Connecting to hidden wifi networks gave serious troubles.
  
• I got now: All I wanted then with an much improved Nokia Maps beta, and things like SIP, A2DP, uPnP support and reading office documents attached to e-mail. Speed, stability and battery usage are now acceptable. In fact I currently use almost all the applications of the phone. And yes, hidden wifi networks work fine now.
  
• My one wish: Decent S/MIME support for e-mails. I want it even more than Skype.

And yes, my next phone should be Symbian Touch, have a magnetic compass for pedestrian navigation, 3x optical zoom, better jpeg-quality, Xenon-flash, be twice as fast, twice as more power effcient and be exactly the same size! Support virtual dolby surround and a builtin bluetooth headset! And oh yes, it should be able to be used in the pouring rain! Although I draw the line at these Burlandish antics.

Is it still worth the bucks? Feel free to answer my questions in the comments below ;-)

www.tweakers.net reported it yesterday evening. It's really there including audio streaming of 30 second song samples. Nice. Still a music shop selling drm is not my beef. Actually I prefere the real CD's. They are like a free backup copy, rip'em and play'em where ever I am. Plus I have a free backup to store on the attic.

For now drm-free music is the next best thing to a real CD.

Nokia's OVI site suggests playing Fifa `08. Nokia's nseries now carries 'N-Gage is Live'. We could say it is now officially online. The game of the week changed this monday from System Rush to Hooked On and they added Fifa `08 to the list of available games.

Just logged into n-gage preview and they told me to goto the www.n-gage.com page and download+install the n-gage application there!  Currently there is support for the following phones:

• Nokia N81
• Nokia N81 8GB
• Nokia N82
• Nokia N95
• Nokia N95 8GB
  

The N73, the N93 and the N93i are said to be expected to be added soon. Currently the download is running and installation will be soon ;-)

Update: Installation went smooth. No problems. Registering went allright allthough it would not take my e-mail adres. I'll have to try that later again.

Current games available are

• System Rush Evolution
• Asphalt 3: Street Rules
• Brain Challenge
• World Series Poker
• Hooked On

Update 2: Several game prices seem to have been upgraded to 9 euros.

My N95 was upgraded yesterday with firmware v21. Today I reinstalled Share Online 3.0 on it. Of course I visited their mobile site to see if everything worked and if my content was still there. Behold, their mobile site now served my MP4 video's as 3GP (176x144 pixel). The video's can't be viewed from within Share Online. You have to use the webbrowser. However it is another step for mobile web penetration. Formerly MP4-video's could only be viewed with flash on their desktop oriented website.

With the new V21 firmware on the N95 you can visit their desktop website too and play the fullsized flash videos on your N95 from the browser. I recommend you have sufficient bandwidth to stream that. Now we  truly have the best of both worlds. View a OVI desktop movie here:

And the mobile version  here (best to switch to your mobile browser ;-) ). I hope the  other nseries models get their firmware upgrade with integrated flashplayer soon. It is far more useful than expected.

All About Symbian reported it here. Time to update folks... I fear emTube will be reduced to a standalone flashplayer. Finally I can acces youtube playlists. Can hardly wait until tonite for my update.

Grtz,

  Snoyt

Share and enjoy!

In our discussion on the NAM95 post of Al Pavangkanan PseudoFinn made a remark about demand paging which made me realize many of us are still unclear about what it actually does. So here is a short blot on my conception of it. Note that I don't work for Nokia, I am unfamiliar with their exact implementation. However the term 'demand paging' is a well known technique in the field of Computer Science and Engineering and the general outline here should suffice to validate what I write here. Any Nokia experts are welcome to comment and improve on this.

PseudoFinn more or less stated that not only improves demand paging the available amount of RAM for applications (TRUE), it increases the speed too (FALSE, but with some remarks).

Demand paging

Demand paging has been around since the early Unix days when memory per megabyte was  far more expensive than hard-disk memory  per MB. It is nothing more than having a virtual amount of memory larger than your RAM allows. Only the part of virtual memory currently accessed is loaded into the RAM (128MB in your case, 64MB in my case). Unused memory is swapped to disk clearing real RAM for running more or larger applications. It allows to use the expensive but fast RAM more efficient while storing currently unused memory on a slow but cheaply and much larger sized disk.

RAM has very high access speeds, disk are in general very slow. For example:

-  N95 RAM: 32-bit*333MHz =  1.3GB/s
- Access to the firmware ROM is in general slower than RAM access.
- Disk speed on the N95 is timed around 2 MB/s.

All memory access has to be checked wether it is resident or stored on disk and handled as such. Demand paging does is not an improvement of you RAM handling. There is no speed increase. In fact it actually slows down memory access. The disk swapping creates noticable delays and slows the general performance. Start Nokia search on you N95 and see the huge delay caused by swapping. Delays that were not there before demand paging.

Demand paging allows however to 'run' a nearly unlimited size of inactive OS-modules and inactive programs. These inactive programs need thus not be closed and switching between them means loading the virtual memory part at low diskspeed to run them. This is often faster and certainly more practical than restarting them. The number of simultaneous active programs is however still limited by your real RAM size. As such you can not have Nokia Maps simultaneously active while taking a picture. Both programs can however both be 'open' at the same time and one of them running. As such you still need to close sometimes programs on the N95-1 because there are two many active programs running. Not all programs support the demand paging properly and lack a proper sleep/inactive mode.

The good part about demand paging is that the bigger free RAM for applications does wonders on the N95-1 that was pretty cramped for running even 1 major application. Memory fragmentation and unreleased memory chunks can 'eat' free RAM and make the N95 unstable causing an auto boot or requiring a manual reset. Demand paging improves hugely on both these problems. Making the phone more stable and reliable. Wootness indeed.

N95-3

The complaints about the slowness of the N95-3 can not be caused by the lack of demand paging. Even without demand paging the free RAM (not virtual memory) for running active application exceeds that of the free RAM of the N95-1 with demand paging. Nokia did not consider demand paging very essential for any other phone than the half brained N95-1 that has only 64MB! The difference between V20 and V12 firware for the N95-1 was not only demand paging. More free RAM can make a computer run smoother, though in the N95 NAM case this is most unlikely the case. Demand paging increased the free RAM in a freshly booted N95-1 to about 27 MB while pre-"demand paging" firmwares had 18-20 MB free RAM. With the N95 NAM having 128MB RAM, It has significant more free RAM than a halfbrained N95-1. 

No, there were also certain power and speed improvements implemented in the firmware. On average the N95-1 V20 firmware is 25% more power efficient. And note that demand pages (disk writes and reads) are actually an additional power drain besides the earlier indicated speed reduction! It think the V20 power and speed optimisations are the things required for the N95NAM to improve it's speed.

Summary

Demand paging does de facto not increase the speed of a computer. In fact it slows it down. It does however allow the free RAM to be used more efficiently when running large amounts of inactive tasks. Demand paging allows for faster switching between them. Running out of RAM for active tasks and forcing a computer system to continuous swap between disk stored virtual memory pages to run an application can actually make a computer dead slow and locked up. The slowness of the N95NAM is unexplained but I would hazard to guess that it has to do with the USA 3G changes or it is the missing speed and power improvements that were implemented in the V20 firmware for the N95-1. No doubt they will occure at the next firmware update, since the slowness is definitely a valid point for discontent.

Nokia has currently several new projects on track to be integrated in new firmware, location tagging working with Maps, wonderful Maps 2.0 itself, Nokia search, flash support in the webbrowser and of course the coming n-gage. All of these are to be implemented in firmware at some time. However remember how long it took Nokia to coff up demand paging for the N95-1. At least 6 months. Expect at least 3-4 months for the N95 NAM. Development and proper testing takes time.

It's looks like first access is nearly over and Nokia is planning to open N-gage 2.0 for all us N-series fans. Why, how, where did I get this info? From my trusty N95 of course. Where else.

I had the N-gage first access installed on my N95, my curiosity is indomitable and I just needed to have that peek at what's coming. Initially it worked for a while until Nokia started checking on device types and the showroom with the First Access Games became empty and void on my N95 classic. Still I managed to buy System Rush Evolution before they closed it ;-). It runs without problems and multiplayer worked too even after the close down! Compared to the SRE demo on the N95 the hardware graphics are missing. But this could be because the N81 lacks the hardware 3D graphics that the N95 has.

And today the showroom is packed again with all the First Access Games the N81 users have access to. Clearly N-Gage 2.0 is preparing for allowing access by the other N-series types. It won't be long until there is a formal announcement is made and the N-Gage application becomes available for all the N-Gage compatible phones.

N-Gage 2.0 looks great, well designed and user friendly, with all the functions needed for social gaming and multi-player ranking  but one. Which one thing you ask? Ahhh, there is nothing better than to hear your friends scream their frustration when you push their digital Ferrari off the road into a ravine. Thus where is my voice-link in the multi-player games? Really text messaging is nice, but not during gaming ;-) It is really hazardous to your health points.

Have a look what is coming your way 'real soon now'. AAS has a review here.