Phone: iTunes Store is open for N95 business!

Well . . . kind of . . .

iTunes Plus is now up and running, meaning that selected songs (and music videos!) are now twice the quality and without DRM of any kind.

In theory the Nokia N95 and probably other N Series devices support AAC and MP4 H.264 which means you can now buy music and videos from Apple for the primary purpose of playing them on your phone. So, does it work?

Sadly, yes and no.

First up, videos. I downloaded ‘Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt’ by We Are Scientists (great video!), it plays, but not smoothly and the audio drifts out of sync within the first few seconds. The reason for this is not some nastiness of Apple’s part, it’s simply a CPU horsepower problem. I’ve tired playing back iPod encoded 640 x 480 video on the N95 before with exactly the same results.

Second, music. Strangely, the N95 displays a ‘File Corrupt’ message and promptly moves along to the next track. This is weird because it will usually play .m4a AAC’s just fine. I tried changing the .m4a to .mp4, this worked but opened the file in Real Player. So it would seem to be a packaging problem rather than an actual problem with the AAC file.

Of course now that there is no DRM, recoding both the video and the song was extremely simple, taking mere seconds for each song and less than a minute for the 3 minute video.

The video play back issue is something that we’ll just have to live with, but surely there is a way for the N95 to play back a standard iTunes Plus AAC music file, any ideas?

Phone: iTunes Store is open for N95 business!

Wednesday, 30 May 2007