On account of this major preoccupation, I would like to get lossless recordings of my own tracks on my media player. When I purchased the Samsung Omnia 7, I was pleased to see it supported .wav files. Since then, I’ve also purchased a book called Mixing Audio. Being a relatively new Kindle owner, I was all about getting the Kindle version of this book, but unfortunately the digital version doesn’t come with ~4GB of .wav files that are referenced routinely throughout the text. So I bought the hard copy. This post recounts my experiences trying to get these 2100+ .wav files on to my Windows Phone, as it was less than straight-forward and very time consuming.

The Omnia 7 does not have a MicroSD slot in Europe (in America, this model is known as the Samsung Focus, and it does), so the only way you can transfer files on to the phone is via Zune (or at least, I’m unaware of any alternatives). Unfortunately, Zune doesn’t support .wav files, even though the phone does, so I’m forced to settle for Zune’s only high-quality format, lossless WMA.

You might wonder why I’m not transferring the files as mp3. While in most cases I would be perfectly happy to do so, two cases where I’m not so happy is with my own recordings and mixing examples like these, where you’re scrutinising the full audio spectrum. Compression would completely alter the reference these files are intended for.

Transcoding Tools

So the problem has become converting .WAV files to .WMA Lossless. Easy enough, right? Wrong. Windows Media Player will do this, but only if the files have been burnt to CD/DVD as audio. In this case, I have my own recordings and a DVD with .WAV files as data, so Windows Media Player is no help.

My next stop was Foobar, my media player of preference. Foobar has a number of conversions tools OOTB, including FLAC and Ogg Vorbis, but no WMA. There are options to create custom converters, which is actually how I stumbled on to my solution. I found this older Hydrogen Audio post which details the process of setting up a WMA converter in Foobar. I tried to do this but the errors I was getting in Expression Encoder that I’ll detail later interfered with the process, so I cut Foobar out of the picture. As I mentioned, I did follow the links in that post to find Expressions Encoder 4, the current version of the only other tool that I’m aware of for transcoding from WAV to WMA. So I installed the .NET Framework version 4 (a pre-requisite) and Expression Encoder, and tried to figure out how to use it. This older post details some of the relevant settings.

Expressions Encoder

The first problem I encountered with Expressions Encoder was that the Import function only allows selection of files in a single folder. This was way too limited for my needs, so I had to use Search Companion to find all .wav files in the parent directory (search for *.wav, including subfolders in the Advanced options) and then drag/drop the files in to Expression Encoder, rather than using the Import function. Unfortunately, Expression Encoder couldn’t seem to handle more than ~600 files at a time before it would crash. It would display the error I mention below, but it appears that the application can’t cope with that many errors popping up at once.

OutputFormat.VideoProfile: “Unable to set properties on null VideoProfile”

Once I figured out I could only convert about 5-600 files in one go, I had to contend with this OutputFormat.VideoProfile error. It popped up for every file that I tried to convert. If converting two-three files it was easy enough to press “Ignore” that many times. Not so for hundreds. After a fair amount of trial and error I found that I could kill Expressions Encoder in Task Manager and launch the “recovered job” when I re-launched the application, and this would bypass the errors. I assume there’s a way to set things up in Expressions Encoder to avoid this problem, but I really don’t have the time to learn how to use it properly given that I’m already wasting hours on this.

Found a recovered job ‘Untitled’ – Click here to open it

Once the “recovered job” is re-launched, it takes a few minutes for Expressions Encoder to analyse the files. On my three-year old Centrino Duo it took about 15 minutes to analyse ~500 files. Once they’ve been analysed, you can specify the WMA Lossless format, language and output properties. The actual encoding process is really quick once all of this is done. I think it may be quicker for lossless than for heavily-compressed files.

The Encode tab on the right is used for specifying the transcoding parameters

Note: you can encode WMA Lossless in up to 24 bits at 96 KHz. Also note that Expressions Encoder was not able to recognise 32-bit source files in my testing, although this might be fixable with the right codec. I worked around this by re-encoding my 32-bit original recordings as 24-bit in Audacity, then transcoding these files in Expressions.

Back to Zune

Once the files have been transcoded, they need to be added to the Zune Collection and the phone needs to synchronise. My next challenge will be figuring out why only ~650 of the 2100+ files initially appeared in my Zune collection (on the desktop application), although I could see all of them getting added. The next day there were 903. Unfortunately, the desktop application won’t synchronise the remainder until it knows they exist, so I suspect I’m now in for some further fiddling, but the lossless audio issue appears to have a viable work-around, even if it’s incredibly inelegant.

Oh, and to end on a positive note, the lossless files sound great on my phone!

In brief, I was looking for the power and display of a MID in the size of a phone – which doesn’t exist yet. I also wanted a single device for mobile internet access, phone and mp3 player. Camera was less important. Given those criteria, I eventually figured out that I needed to choose between:

• Something that would fit in my pocket versus something with a big display (obvious really, but difficult to keep this issue in focus when tempted by better resolution/power)
• Something with good speed versus something with good battery life
  Note: I realise this is not always accurate, but it’s a truism that faster processors drain more battery – particularly when you start talking about the difference in speed between a smart phone and a Vista-capable MID
• Something with Google Android verus something with a QWERTY keyboard
• Something with good European availability versus the bleeding edge temptation of the Pocketables and UMPC Portal reviews

I narrowed my phone choices down to these (in vague order of preference). I’ve included summaries of the reviews I found at the time, so they may not be current now and are completely unvalidated personally:

• HTC Touch Pro 2 – released early June, no 3.5mm headphone jack but USB adapters are available, great battery, poor camera, no flash, Windows Mobile 6.1 but a free upgrade to Windows Moile 6.5 at release
• Acer Tempo M900
  Pros vs HTC: released just before the HTC Touch Pro 2 and has better camera/flash, larger screen, possibly better GPS, fingerprint reader can double as an optical mouse, has scroll bar w/click
  Cons vs. HTC: lower memory, might be slower and is slightly heavier, mini USB for the headset, no 3.5mm headphone jack (there are some 2.5mm Sennheiser headphones though), Windows Mobile 6.1 but no free upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5
• Palm Pre – Launch looked completely unreliable
• Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 – looked a bit uninspiring, screen not as good, less storage, older spec, flimsy buttons on the front

I narrowed my MID choices down to these (again, in approximate order of preference):

• Kohjinsha SC3 – swivling tablet, great review, not the best battery, a bit more expensive
• Eking I1 UMPC – same as the WiBrain, no 3G/GPS in this model but can use a USB dongle – company may be a bit flakey
• Raon Digital Everun Note – a bit larger, but very powerful, no swivel, difficult to find precise technical info
• Aigo MID 8888W – 3G model available but pricey, no mouse pointer, possible wi-fi issues, keyboard a bit strange
• Gigabyte M528/Compal Jax 10 – same hardware as the Aigo MID (above) but not all models released yet (3G for instance)
• UMID M1 – first units have no HSDPA, no mouse pointer, build may be poor, keyboard a bit strange
• Gigabyte M704 – larger, primarily tablet, a bit too slow for Vista
• Viliv S5 – no keyboard, mouse pointer only works in four directions
• BenQ S6 – cheap but no QWERTY keyboard
• Sony VAIO P – expensive, and not really small enough

Ultimately what made up my mind was the London Underground. Unless you get a seat you don’t have enough space to use anything bigger than a smart phone. Even if I could guarantee myself a seat, most of the best MIDs are quite expensive. Since this is where I would use this device most I opted for the phone with the biggest/best screen I could get and a QWERTY keyboard. I vacillated for some time between the Acer Tempo M900 and the HTC Touch Pro 2 but ultimately went for HTC because of the Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade (due on 6th October). Also, Acer is still quite new to mobile phones. I know the M900 comes to Acer through acquisition, but I still felt there was some risk.

Unfortunately I’ve had pretty severe performance problems (which seem to be tied to network connectivity issues) on my Touch Pro 2. These are periodic, but crippling after a reboot. It usually takes 20-30 minutes before I can properly use it. I’ve not done any serious troubleshooting because the Windows Mobile 6.5 release date is so near. In terms of interface and screen I love it, but Windows Mobile 6.1 and the networking/performance problems have proved quite dissatisfying. I’ll report more once I get 6.5 running.

One last thing. I wound up buying an mp3 player and sacrificing convergance. I didn’t expect to do this, but the phone + adapter would actually be quite cumbersome in your pocket. The Sansa Clip is so small that I really don’t mind. That’s a tip in its own right if anyone is in the market for an extremely portable mp3 player for less than £30.