Taking life philosophically.
5 February 2010
I was glad to find out how to transfer music to my Nokia 5530 mobile phone on Ubuntu. In the end it is quite simple. To do it you may need to install a few packages from the repositories. I used the Banshee media player, and so should you, if you want to follow my instructions. Obviously enough, Banshee comes in a package called ‘banshee’. Since the majority of the music I have is encoded with Ogg Vorbis which is not supported by my phone, I needed to install the ‘gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse package’ as well to let Banshee transcode the tracks to supported formats. You can install the necessary packages with the following commands:
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse
sudo apt-get install banshee
After the necessary packages are installed, you need to connect the phone to the
computer with the USB cable that comes with the phone and select the ‘Mass
storage’ mode. After this, you should see the memory card of the phone mounted
under /media/. In the root level folder of the phone’s memory card you should
create a file called .is_audio_player with the following content:
audio_folders=Sounds/Digital/
output_formats=audio/mpeg,audio/aac,audio/x-ms-wma
The first line tells Banshee where to find and to store the music. The second line lets Banshee know which formats the phone supports, so it can do the necessary conversions. I have tested straight MP3, Vorbis to MP3 and FLAC to MP3, and all work fine.
After you have saved the file, start up Banshee. Your phone should now be
visible on the side bar on the left. If this is the case, everything should be
working and you can start copying your music to the phone. Once the music is
copied, be sure to unmount the phone in /media/ before detaching the cable.
You might need to refresh the library on the phone (Options/Refresh library)
if the new tracks do not appear right away.
If Banshee does not recognize the phone, please double check the file you created. In particular, make sure that the name is correct, with the leading dot. Note that you might not see the file in Nautilus because the leading dot means that the file is hidden. Select View/Show Hidden Files to see it.
The instructions may work with other Symbian Series 60 phones as well, in
particular with other Nokia S60 phones such as the 5230, the 5800 and the X6,
but before trying them, you should verify the location of the sound files and
edit the .is_audio_player file as necessary.
Update (6 February 2010): It seems that there is some support in Banshee even
without adding the .is_audio_player file. The phone gets recognized, and Banshee even
transcodes the tracks. However, the tracks are apparently not correctly tagged,
since they appear on the phone as by an unknown artist, and the phone seems to
use the filename for the track name. Therefore, my instructions still seem useful.
The journal of Timo Laine (contact information). Cultural commentary from the perspective of a philosophy student in Helsinki.