Nokia symbian smartphones and m4a tags

2010-05-28 09:26:02

Hi, I have a brand new Nokia X6 phone (runs on Symbian S60v5 OS) that I'm trying to put some m4a music on it and I'm not getting any of the tags recognized by the phone's music library, they just show up as having no tags thus sorted as "Unknown" in the library.
I'm using m4a files as they come from foobar's nero mp4 converter, using mostly default settings (VBR, q0,30).
The files play fine on the phone's music player, only the tags are missing.
The files show up as MPEG-4 3GPP Media Release 6 Basic in MediaInfo, with the audio stream being about 80 kbps AAC v4 LC SBR.
The tags show up fine in either foobar or mp3tag or other phone player like Samsung.
I've searched the forum and I found some topics dealing with this, suggesting that I should tag m4a files with id3 tag to get them recognized, but I think that info must be outdated, shouldnt Nokia have already fix their mpeg4 tag reading?
Anyone getting their m4a files properly recognized in a Nokia smartphone?

Nokia symbian smartphones and m4a tags

Reply #1 – 2010-05-28 09:39:14

Have a look here: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=80476

What I do right now is converting with nero (-hev2) then add ID3v1 tags (through foobar run services) except for title and tracknumber tag, so that my phone lists them as filename (which is %tracknumber% - %title%) while other tags are browsable on my phone + parsable by foobar

hope I didn't confuse you, but not sure for the reason why nokia uses such awful tag scheme

Nokia symbian smartphones and m4a tags

Reply #2 – 2010-05-28 11:54:12

Thanks, I'll take a look.
So they still use that weird id3v1 on m4a? After so many years they didnt have time to implement an standard tagging scheme? Shame on them...
Its weird because I had another Nokia phone before and I think I managed to get m4a tags working somehow, maybe using Nokia's own software converter?

Nokia symbian smartphones and m4a tags

Reply #3 – 2010-05-28 12:59:23

sure, you can use Ovi player and manage files that way, but that player will choke on larger (> 5-10K) library + you already have media player
or you are talking about PC suite and integrated AAC encoder (there are no really options there)

Nokia symbian smartphones and m4a tags

Reply #4 – 2010-05-28 13:35:59

I think I used Nokia Music to transfer the songs and add album art, not really for transcoding, just put the files in that library and added the embedded album art there, but now Nokia Music doesnt exist anymore, its Ovi Player, so I'm not sure if that would work.

Nokia symbian smartphones and m4a tags

Reply #5 – 2010-05-28 16:08:45

Does the Nokia phone recognize the tags if the m4as are generated by iTunes?

Nokia symbian smartphones and m4a tags

Reply #6 – 2010-08-14 16:21:18

I use AAC files encoded via NeroAAC in M4a container. I use Foobar to encode my files. I also tag them with foobar. Tagging with Windows internal explorer tagger often fails. All my m4a files work fine on Nokia devices (Symbian60v3).

Nokia symbian smartphones and m4a tags

Reply #7 – 2010-08-24 21:02:37

After a year i found out some interesting. Windows needs mp3 tag type ID3v1 to read out the tags correctly and it writes only ID3v1 tags and it also uses his own tags which a can be a problem for other players. So don't tag files with windows explorer.
Nokia player should handle both ID3v1 and IDv2. Better make shure to use both in the container header. Foobar can do this quite good.