KX5 Song playing issues

[Zawmby]

A friend an I both purchased a slider remix recently and we love the phones. The phone just seems a little picky on which mp3s it will play. we were curious about what makes it do that or if there is any recomendations on the types of mp3s it may prefer. We attempted to examine different things about the files(2 that play, 2 that dont) to see if we were able to find anything in common or different to pin point the problem. bitrate, id3 tag version, khz, etc.. we would really appreciate any suggestions.
-thanx

[//Nathan]

Well, I've never had any issues playing songs, but every song on my KX-5 is encoded to the exact same format/bitrate. I played around with a few variations - my KX-5 is very versatile, haven't met anything it couldn't play - and settled on 22kHz, 96k Mp3s encoded with Nero's mp3PRO encoder, in the Wave Editor application.

I would understand if you don't have Nero and don't want to pay for it, but what I would recommend in that case is, find a cheap or free encoder, find a format which works for you, and encode every song to that specification. My memory card is only 512MB, and my phone music folder is only about 250MB, so it's not a storage constraint at all.

What I don't get about the KX-5 is what tag information it needs. Sometimes it will list the artist/album information correctly, sometimes not.

And one thing I get but do not like is its ordering. It orders by modified date, or creation date. One of the two. I have a program which will change the date/time in a file, or a bunch of files. I ran it on my phone music folder, and it sorted some of the songs, but not all. I wish the damn KX-5 would sort the music by filename, or by artist name, or by song title, something that would make it easier to find stuff. And I only have about 75 songs up there.

Good luck.

[Zawmby]

yeah the ordering thing sucks. beyond that each phone(or each batch of phones) seem to be unique in there problems so its alot of hit and miss for me. I have tried different encoding but our phones are just being picky. 2 songs encoded identically may or may not play its hard to find anything specifically that would be causing the issue. I use ITunes to contend with the id3 tag info and use whatever is the newest version. the phones seem to work well with that but no telling if it works on other phones.

[medicraerae]

My phone will shut itself down when I try to play MP3

[medicraerae]

I figured out this prob... It is all in how the song is named.. I went back and changed all me MP3's to "songs.mp3" and they all play now with out resetting my phone..

[//Nathan]

Regarding naming, I use no spacing or punctuation. I figured the phone would use a primitive filesystem (compared to that on a PC) so I didn't want to strain it. Also I'll shorten the name sometimes. Like for example "Van Halen - Don't Tell Me.mp3" would become "VanHalen-DontTellMe.mp3" or maybe "VH-DontTellMe.mp3". And you can substitute & for and, U for you, UR for your or you're, etc., etc. It doesn't have to be pretty. In fact if you can see the whole thing without waiting for it to (slowly!) scroll, you'd best keep it to screen width or narrower.

iTunes for ID3 stuff? You gotta be kidding me. Unless they changed it, iTunes can't write ID3 tags. This was... Version 4.7 I think. Haven't touched it since. I was using it to tag my MP3 collection, as it seemed pretty easy. Then I found out it wasn't writing to the tags, but rather to its own internal database. Google "mp3tag" for a good tagging program.

[Zawmby]

its like version 7 point something now and yeah it does id3 tags, it works great i use itunes for all my mp3 needs, I didnt think about the whole primitive file system thing, ill go back and name things as if I were using dos and we will see how it takes to that

[pilot777]

I'd recommend to make 256 and more kbs tracks 'coz the original Kyo headset is a piece of crap. And use a 1 GB TF.

[//Nathan]

Not quite DOS; you're not limited to 8.3 filenames, if you recall what that was. (Back in the DOS days a filename could only have 8 characters and the extension was limited to 3 characters. Microsoft Word, for example, is still WINWORD.EXE, at least in Office XP/2002.)

256k? Does it really sound better than 96k? I use 96k and it sounds fine... well, it leaves a little bit to be desired, but then I don't expect much out of a phone. I've only got a 512MB card and I'm not taking the leap to 1GB anytime soon. In any case it's whatever works for you.

[pilot777]

just test and say then. The faster the bitrate is the better it sounds -- no wonder.

[medicraerae]

what are you talking aboiut bitrate?