June 8th, 2006
Jason Dunn
I covered off the topic of bit rate previously, and why having a true CD-quality file at 1410 kbps means we end up with each music file in the 40 to 50MB range. When you think back to the mid-’90s when the popularity of the Web and email began to explode, most people were still using dial-up modems. Moral and legal ramifications aside, the roots of digital music lay in people trading and sharing music online. It’s hard to share a 50MB file while on 28.8 kbps dial-up – such a file would take, under realistic conditions of 2KB per second download speed, roughly seven hours to download. If the file was instead 2MB in size, it would only take 16 minutes to download. That’s quite a big difference! So file sizes needed to get smaller, but how? Psychoacoustic compression.
Psychoacoustics is a fancy word that simply means “what human beings can hear”. The human ear can only perceive certain frequencies of sound. Without getting too complicated (and mostly because I’m not an acoustic scientist), the idea is that in any given audio recording, there are frequencies that we can’t hear at all, but are still in the recording. If we get rid of those frequencies, we have less data to store in the song, and that means a smaller digital file size. The audio quality slider on Windows Media Player that has “Smallest Size” on one end and “Highest Quality” on the right is a nice visual for how this works. The more frequencies are dropped, the more compressed it is, and the smaller the file size – but the lower the quality of the audio, because as the file gets smaller, parts of the song that you can hear get tossed out.
By the way, this same theory works in JPEG pictures and MPEG movies, where visual data we can’t perceive is removed and the more data is removed the worse it looks. If you want to dig into the gory details of human hearing, this Web site has a lot of detail.
So let’s loop this back into our previous discussion of bit rate: the lower the bit rate, the less data there is in a song. Bit rate is the way we describe the level of compression. A 64kbps song is four times more compressed than a 256kbps song. It has four times less bits per second, which is four times less audio data. Now here’s where human hearing factors in: there’s a point where, once so much data has been removed from the song, that it just doesn’t sound right. This threshold is different for every person. Some people claim they can tell the difference between a CD and a 320kbps audio file. Some people can tell the difference between 64kbps and 128kbps, and others can’t. Just like eyesight, everyone hears differently. That’s why there’s no “right” answer when it comes to audio compression. The best you can do is select a quality level that’s right for your ears. No more theory – next up, the rubber meets the road and we talk about selecting the right audio file format (WMA or MP3) and the right bit rate.
June 8th, 2006
Jason Dunn
Whenever a new site is launched, one of the primary goals is to get some links up on other sites in order to get some traffic. And that’s exactly what I’d like. 
So if you have a Windows Mobile-related site (this is important, I can’t link to 100 random blogs), let’s swap links. If you’d like to link to this site, you can use our 88 x 31 button, our small logo, or just link with the words “The Two Inch View” to www.twoinchview.com. If you’d like me to reciprocate, please use the contact form to drop me an email with the site name and URL you’d like linked to.
June 6th, 2006
Jason Dunn
Much has been said over the years regarding MP3 and WMA music formats, and as a result there’s a lot of confusion about the strengths and weaknesses of each format. If you’re going to rip your own CDs, what format should you use? And what bit rates? Better yet, what does bit rate even mean? You’ve probably seen “128kbps WMA”, but what the heck does that mean? Here’s a quick primer on these two formats, starting with a discussion of bit rate. And for the sake of keeping things simple, I’m only going to cover MP3 and WMA – support for other formats, such as Ogg or AAC, aren’t widely supported across Windows Mobile devices, though there are some third party tools that enable support for those formats. The discussion on bit rate applies to these other formats just the same however. Lossless is another topic entirely - Damion Chaplin at Digital Media Thoughts has written an article on the topic.
When you listen to a CD, you’re listening to digitally encoded music. The quality of a digital sound file is measured in bits – 0’s and 1’s – the more bits, the more information there is, and the more information, the more sound there is. More sound means the digital audio is closer to the original recording, and when you’re listening to a song, you want it to be as close to the real thing as possible, right? So that CD you bought has a really high bit rate – 1410 kilobits per second (kbps) to be exact. That means that a CD, which is the consumer benchmark for audio quality today, dishes out audio at 1410 kbps (remember that number for later). Audiophiles will tell you that DVD Audio or SA-CD is the real high-water benchmark for quality, but considering those formats have been colossal failures with mainstream consumers in terms of adoption, I don’t consider them to be pertinent to this discussion.
So if a CD is 1410 kbps, why would we drop the bit rate when creating WMA or MP3 files, and thus the quality? Storage space is the answer why. Doing some quick math tells us that a 1410 kbps song requires 176 kilobytes per second, or 0.176 MB. Figure on an average four-minute song, and we have an audio file that needs 42MB of space. 42MB per song, multiplied by 15 songs, and we have 630MB, which is nearly the capacity of a CD. It all makes sense now, doesn’t it? But do you want to be able to fit only twelve songs on your 512MB digital audio player? No, I didn’t think so – that might not even be a whole album. So in order to make those big 42MB songs smaller, we compress them by lowering the bit rate. We toss out the 0’s and 1’s – we actually remove parts of the song in order to make it smaller. So what does a song sound like with parts missing? That’s the magic of psychoacoustics – and what I’ll be explaining next!
June 5th, 2006
Jason Dunn
To understand where Windows Mobile media and entertainment is now, I think it’s important to understand what came before. Looking back on the history of when portable devices met personal entertainment, there are several notable devices. The first such device might be the portable radio. Initial radios were large, bulky devices that stayed in the living room of a home. They evolved into small, handheld devices that could be carried anywhere. The appeal? Music wherever you were, but the personal aspect was limited to the owner making a choice of which radio station to listen to. If you didn’t like what was on the radio, you didn’t have much of a choice.
The Sony Walkman TPS-L. Image courtesy of Sony History
Portable radios evolved into one the most popular portable entertainment devices of all time: the Sony Walkman. What made the walkman so popular so quickly? It blended the personalization of cassette tapes with the portability factor of a handheld radio. The combination of those two elements is what led to the explosive popularity. The Sony Walkman was first introduced in 1979 as the “Sound about” and was estimated to sell 5,000 units per month. Just two months after its release, ten times that amount (50,000) were being sold every month in Japan. When it made its way to North America, it quickly became a cultural icon.
Fast forward to today, and we have a huge assortment of digital audio players (commonly referred to as “DAP”), all bringing the same key ingredients as the original Walkman: they play back the content the user wants to listen to, and they are small enough to be portable. Almost every major, and minor, player in the computer and consumer electronics industry has stepped onto the field with everything from minuscule cube DAPs with flash memory to paperback book-sized media players with 100 gigabyte hard drives. The iPod is the market leader in hard drive-based players at the moment, but they have a lot of competition from some very determined industry players, so there’s plenty of choice.
A new generation of Windows Mobile Portable Media Centers, such as the Toshiba Gigabeat S, will blend the consumer friendly PMC interface with powerful synchronization options - all in a package that’s small and functional enough to go head to head with any portable media player on the market.
June 1st, 2006
Jason Dunn
Welcome to this new blog, dedicated to Windows Mobile media and entertainment. And in case you didn’t get it, the site name comes from the screen sizes of some of these devices. “The Five Inch View” just didn’t sound as cool. 
Coverage will be focused purely on Windows Mobile devices, which includes Smartphones, Pocket PCs, and of course Portable Media Centers. My role here is to dig up interesting news items, write columns and tutorials about how to get the most out of your devices, and present you with reviews of great new hardware and software. Because this is a Microsoft Windows Mobile sponsored blog (as in, they pay for it), I’m hoping to get interviews with key people on Microsoft teams to bring you the inside track on where things are headed. I’m going to focus more on quality than quantity here. This is not going to be a high-volume news blog – for that, look to the other sites that I work on, Pocket PC Thoughts, Smartphone Thoughts, and Digital Media Thoughts. This is also not meant to be a full-blown community site, hence the lack of forums. This is a simple blog, but I believe it will serve a useful purpose in the Windows Mobile world.
Because of the Microsoft sponsorship on this project, this site is 100% advertising free: no affiliate links, no banners, no text ads, nothing. Our RSS feeds are full text, and the site is on a different (faster) server than my Thoughts Media sites. In addition to this gorgeous layout, the designer, Fabrizio Fiandanese, put a lot of effort into making this site as readable as possible on a number of devices and browsers - there’s a full mobile version as well, so you can read it from your Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Smartphones. Try a Print Preview from your browser just for fun - you’ll like the results. This is useful if you want to PDF any of the articles. It should be a great user experience - enjoy!
My hope for this blog is that you, the reader, will learn what Windows Mobile devices are capable of when it comes to media and entertainment, and how to maximize the value of what you already own. I’ve been involved in this industry since 1996, when the first clamshell Windows CE-based handheld PCs (HPCs) came onto the market. I’ve seen these devices grow from being basic personal information management (PIM) devices to being full-blown powerhouses with amazing communication and entertainment functionality. The mobile device market is booming, and the future is very bright for Windows Mobile. Stick around, and be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed – this is going to be fun!
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