Cheat more tunes onto your Nokia 6500 Classic

How to cheat more tunes onto your Nokia 6500 Classic (without losing quality! - getting more tunes on 1GB than you’d think possible!)

Squeeze the most out of the 6500’s 1-gig memory by packing it fit to burst with music. Just how do you pack it to the limit? By following these simple steps…

Master in 2 minutes

Step 1: iTune your handset
iTunes might not be specifically designed to work with your mobile, but it gives superb control over the way your music is encoded, which means you’ll squeeze more in with the right settings. Download it here, install it on your PC and fire it up. However, before you do anything else dive into its preferences menu and choose ‘advanced’ then ‘importing’.

Here you can tweak the types of music files iTunes creates when ripping a CD or importing other music files.

Step 2: Quality consideration
Picking which quality to encode at is a tricky business, but less so if you’re going to be listening to music on your handset, through headphones and out in the big, wide, noisy world.

See, there’s no reason to encode at iTunes’ default high quality setting if you’re going to be listening amongst a hubbub of background noise, so you can afford to trim it back, and in doing so you’ll make smaller music files, thus increasing the number you can fit on a memory card.

Change iTunes’ import setting to MP3 format and then choose ‘custom’. Next choose a stereo bitrate of 64kbps. Leave the other boxes as they are and choose ‘OK’. Now you can import CDs or existing music files and have iTunes downsize them for you.

Step 3: Easy transfer
Getting your songs from iTunes to your phone is easy. Either copy and paste them by hand from their home on your hard drive (you can find this out by right-clicking a song and selecting ‘get info’) direct to your memory card, or if you’re using a Mac, download Nokia’s Multimedia Transfer software. It’ll let you copy iTunes playlists across automatically. You can find it here, but be careful to make a playlist containing just your ‘phone friendly’ audio files, or you’ll get a mix of large and small files, defeating the object of shrinking them.

Essential kit
A computer with iTunes

Make it better with more memory!
Squeezing more songs onto your memory card is all well and good, but it means converting songs twice if you want to listen to them in high quality at home too. Skip the extra steps and invest in more memory, then you won’t have to worry about filling up your phone, or the quality of your tracks!

Extra resources
iTunes