Nokia phones and iTunes Plus fix revisited

Jun 22, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: jking_ok

This is an enhancement to this recent hint to get iTunes Plus songs to play on certain AAC-supporting devices, such as Nokia/Symbian-based mobile phones including the Nokia N95. I've tested this using a Nokia E61.

There is only a single difference that matters to the phone between the iTunes-converted (as shown in the hint) or QuickTime Pro re-wrapped (comment to the hint) AAC file and the original iTunes Plus song: iTunes 7.2 (and/or the iTunes Store) moved an 'atom' (the name given to a chunk of content in the .m4a file) from being a child to a sibling (that is, up one level in the hierarchy). This causes the phone to baulk when it sees the atom at an unexpected location in the file.

The solution is to move the 'pinf' atom back to where QuickTime puts it (as a child of 'esds'). There is a more detailed explanation on my blog, and a simple tool (PutPinfInItsPlace) for making the change on Mac OS X (or Windows). The advantage of this tool is the song remains fully intact, no copying across of the metadata is required, and the audio data is unmodified. The only limitation I've seen thus far is that after fixing the file for compatibility, iTunes loses the ability to recognise the tracks as 'Purchased AAC audio files.' Instead they will become 'AAC audio files.' So any Smart Playlists using this naming scheme (i.e. this hint) will be affected.

To fix the files using the tool,

You'll need to repeat the process for each folder/album of songs you have, as well as when you buy new songs from the iTunes Store (a smart playlist would help here). Restart iTunes so that it reloads the songs. Test out the fixed versions and delete the backed-up versions if you wish.

Now you can copy the songs to a memory card or via Bluetooth to your phone (my suggestion: use Show in Finder from a Smart Playlist to make this easier) and they should play. Note that many Nokia phones will not display iTunes metadata (my E61 uses the file name as the track title).

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070609012009186