Music format for Android Phones

Your Android-powered phone comes with a little storage card called a micro secure digital (SD) storage card.This tiny card (it’s about one-fourth the size of a postage stamp) can hold up to 8GB worth of data,which is enough to store a lot of songs.

Note: How many songs can you pack into an 8GB SD card? Well,that depends on a lot of things.It depends on the format you use to store your songs,the quality (bit rate) at which they’re encoded,how long the songs are, and whether you are using that micro SD card for anything else. As the saying goes,your mileage may vary. The G1 from T-Mobile comes with a 1GB card,but you can find larger cards at a variety of retail stores.

Your Android-powered phone is an excellent music player supporting more formats than you may even know exist,and definitely more than I had ever heard of.We all know about MP3 files,and of course those are supported,but also supported is this fine list of formats:

• M4A: This is the iTunes DRM free format.

• WMA version 8: This format comes from Microsoft’s Windows Media Player.

• MIDI: This is what the kids today would call “old School.”Best example? Think of Mario Brothers on your Nintendo.

• WAV: This is an older sound file format that you run into on Windows-based computers for event sounds,such as new mail,error messages,and the like.

• OGG Vorbis: This is an open-source format that is supposed to be of a better quality than MP3.The primary place to find information on it is at www.archive.org/details/audio.

• AMR: This particular format is primarily a speech format,as opposed to music.Most commonly,these files come from a voice note-type system.