Mobile music downloads shrink in comparison to the volume of downloads from the web through services like iTunes and Napster. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that the industry is on an upward trend as more and more consumers turn away from traditional music formats. According to the BBC, the mobile music business is worth around £3.2bn –a substantial amount of money for an industry which only really took off a year ago.

Music on mobile phones became the buzzword in 2005 when many manufacturers announced dedicated phones such as the Sony Ericsson W800i and the Motorola ROKR E1. Nokia reportedly sold 45 million music-enabled phones in 2005 and expects sales to top 8 million this year. In a bid to provide Nokia users with a full range of music services, the Finnish company acquired Loudeye, a US-based firm which administers a licensed catalogue of about 1.5 million tracks. In the same way that iPod users purchase songs from the iTunes Music Store, Nokia hopes to follow suit in the mobile phone industry.

What’s great about digital music is its ability to produce similar sound qualities but in smaller file sizes. Normally you’d only be able to burn about 15 songs on your average CD-R. If those songs were in MP3 form however, you’d be able to burn more than four albums. This is possible because digital music can undergo audio compression processes to reduce the size of audio files. Music on mobile phones are a form of lossy compression, a format used frequently on the Internet for streaming media and telephony applications. This method of compressing and decompressing data will produce material which is slightly different from the original. Undergoing the process once will still produce similar enough material but the more you compress and decompress a file, the more its quality will deteriorate.

The most popular digital audio encoding format is the MP3 which is short for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. The format uses minimal amounts of data to produce top quality sounds by discarding sounds which are less audible to human hearing.

MP3 files can be compressed at different bit rates ranging from 32 kbps to 320 kbps. This means that more data is included from the original sound file when a higher bit rate is used which in turn produces higher quality sounds during playback. For mainstream users like you and I, a 128 kbps rate is good enough.

Thomson Consumer Electronics, a French company, holds the patent for the MP3 format. In 1998, plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 format led to focus on the creation of alternatives such as the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format.

The WMA format was developed by Microsoft and is part of the Windows Media framework. It initially claimed to sound better than the MP3 format but tests have proven otherwise. The biggest threat to the MP3 format comes in the form of the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format which is used by Apple’s iTunes. The AAC format is a new advanced method of compressing audio wave data algorithms. It is the product of a collaboration between Dolby, Faunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony and Nokia.

AAC files are smaller than their MP3 counterparts but provide comparatively good quality. For example, if you convert a 128kbps MP3 file to a 96 kbps AAC one, the loss in quality is negligible while the file’s size will be reduced by around 600-750kb.
Despite growing competition, the MP3 format remains the most widely used. This is significantly obvious among peer-to-peer (P2P) network users –a 2005 study found 64% of audio files on P2P networks encoded in MP3 format.

There are a number of music-enabled mobile phones which you can look out for. You won’t need to fret too much over which phone supports which format -the benchmark for new models seems to be the popular MP3 format and the AAC format.
The LG KG920 supports the WMA format as well on top of the benchmark duo. Priced at RM2499, the phone comes with a 5-megapixel digital camera and allows the user to play videos as well. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ll find the Samsung X680. It doesn’t support WMA files or play videos; its 0.3-megapixel camera is a joke next to the LG phone but it’s a steal at RM799.

Stefanie is married to her iPodin spite of the numerousmusic-enabled mobile phones flooding the market today This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it