I’m not sure why Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t like mp4/aac format but not being able to transfer my tracks in mp4 through MTP to my N81 really piss me off. At first I installed Songbird 1.0.0 to try synchronizing the tracks through the MTP addon but it doesn’t even play *.mp4 tracks out of the box under Windows XP SP3 (although it claimed otherwise). Weird thing happens when I was trying to synchronize anyway by having the files renamed to *.mp4 extension and it succeeded but without any meta-tag information.
Then I retried by renaming all files to *.m4a extension. This time tag information is displayed properly but somehow songbird still refused to play the files. And attempt to sync the tracks failed saying the file format is not supported (although my N81 supports mp4). I then finally gave up and went back to WMP to try again.
WMP doesn’t recognize mp4 format by default and I was like “Well, then you should be able to find appropriate codec or something” but it doesn’t happen… Then I tried to synchronize anyhow but it was a complete failure. Fortunately after some searching and reading some frustrated comments posted everywhere I found codec for WMP here.
Now the tracks play just fine however there are no tag information being displayed. Instead the filename is displayed on screen. Who cares about the filename anyway but I decided to try sending a track to my mobile. The track was sent successfully but when I try playing the track through my mobile’s music player no artist and track information are displayed properly.
After another round of random searching around, I found another tool to extract tag information from the tracks to be read by WMP here. After installing the application now my tracks are happily synchronized to my mobile. I really don’t understand why do I have to go through so many hours trying to rip to mp4 (through foobar2000 as I cannot find a better ripper under Gnome) then get a codec installed myself and get tag support installed myself again and only synchronize them through WMP (not to mention I stupidly downloaded songbird to use the MTP addon, but songbird is still a decent player application with great potential).
Edit: I shouldn’t have get this published this soon, as the meta tags for some tracks are not properly imported to my mobile!!!!!
