music player question

If i get all the stuff I need to put songs on my 9900 can I put songs from my computer on my phone or do I have to buy them from vcast or something?

Your best bet is to get an sd card, and a USB reader for the card so you can load songs from your computer to the card. Put the card in the phone and you should be able to play the music on it. WMA? Can someone confirm that?

Format the card in the phone.
Then use a card reader to sync the card with WMP 10 to your PC.
(sync will keep the tracks in order, WMP11 w/n work)
See this forum topic

The software generally SUCKS for doing this. Try this instead:

1. Format the card in the phone.
2. Connect to your computer with a data cable.
3. Access your "Tunes and Tones" in the "Get It Now" Menu.
4. Press the "Sync" button (right softkey on 8600)
5. Look in "My Computer" to see the phone listed.
6. Click on SD Card icon
7. Load music in the "Music" directory with artist as directory, album as subdirectory containing songs.

Note: No VBR (Variable bitrate) files.

Frankly, I much prefer ripping with Audiograbber or Exact Audio Copy. Both will create IDTags in the ripping process.

What software sucks?

The Verizon Music Essentials Manager that came boxed with the product. It would never recognize my VX8600 phone in Sync Mode, never transfer files, still doesn't allow you to remove files from your Music Library etc.

HOWEVER, I have since downloaded a new version that DOES WORK. It is slower than using the method outlined above, but faster than BitPim, that's for sure. It automatically trims filenames to 32 characters...which will save time if you have long filenames.

You can download it free, including with all the USB Drivers, here:

V CAST Music Essentials Manager Download

I would just get a card, and reader like John said, transfer all the music you want to listen to to the card, put the card back in the phone and enjoy. It is the fastest way there is....bar none.

Yes, by default the phone is set to accept WMA files. You can change that however so it will play mp3's.

Do this:

open your phone

press OK

type 0000000 (7) zero's - should take you to services

go to Music Settings, press OK

change it to mp3 or mp3 & MOD, press OK

Now clear all the way out and your set. Your phone will now play mp3's. If you set it to mp3 & MOD your phone will play both mp3's and WMA files.

DO NOT PLAY WITH ANY OTHER SETTINGS WHILE IN THE SERVICES AREA, YOU COULD RUIN YOUR PHONE.....TRY AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!!

The 9900 is set, by default, to play both WMA and MP3 files without changing any settings.

It's pretty fast hooking up the phone as the reader and you don't have to bother with removing the card.

The new VCast software does an "OK" job of it...much faster than BitPim.

Obviously, there's more than one way to do it and users can take advantage of that.

What sampling rate do you guys suggest for cellphone MP3 player "ripping" from CD? Too low and fidelity will suffer and too high and you use excessive memory per music file.

thanks for any guidance you can give!

You have to decide what's good enough for you. Obviously, higher bit rates sound better...but you won't get as much music on your microSD card.

Take the 10 minute cut "Bat Out of Hell" from Meatloaf.

56kb/s Frauhofer MP3 4.02 MB
64kb/s WMA 4.679 MB
128kbs LAME JS 9.2 MB
192kbs LAME JS 13.857 MB

JS=Joint Stereo

I've played around a bit and found that VBR files (Variable Bit Rate) DO IN FACT PLAY FINE on the 8600. Just watch the length of the filenames.

Using either Exact Audio Copy or Audiograbber, in conjunction with LAME,
you can wring much higher bit rates out of smaller files.


-V2 --vbr-new -q0 --lowpass 19.7 -b96

That's taking Meatloaf's 99.4MB .WAV file and compressing it down to 14.7MB

It shows up as a 320kb/s file, but much of the audio is actually encoded at lower rates.

-V5 --vbr-new -q0 --lowpass 18

Yields a 10.8 MB file

I put some test files on a page.

Audio Encoding Test

Thanks for the information! I could not tell any difference on my phone between the 192kb sampling rate and the 64k sampling rate. For casual listening, I think I will use the 64kb files as you suggest.

I appreciate the help!