I've just bought a Windows Mobile Smartphone which can only take a maximum of 2GB MicroSD card so I want to store my music at 64kbs in order to get the maximum amount of music on it. After a lot of listening tests AAC HE is the only format that gives me acceptable quality at this bit rate so I have used dbPowerAmp Music Converter using the m4a Nero (AAC) Release 7 codec to convert my raw FLAC files to AAC+ format.

The resulting m4a files play beautifully but unfortunately all the decent media players that I have found for Windows Mobile won't recognise the iTunes tagging that the Nero encoder puts into the files and so I can't use any of the library functions in these media players to browse by artist and/or album.

Are there any tools that I can use to convert the iTunes tags to one of the ID3 formats so that hopefully the tags will be recognised by the media player (my two favorites right now are Pocket Player or straight Microsoft Media Player)? (Luckily I use an HTC device and HTC have bundled an AAC decoder so these programs use this and can play the files, even AAC HE v2 format, just fine.)

Failing the above, can anyone at least tell me what the iTunes tag format is called (is it Ape2?) so that at least I can google for something like "Convert <something> tags to ID3" because right now I don't even know what <something> is and googling "convert iTunes tags to ID3" didn't get me anything useful.

- Julian

Make sure that your media playing software supports HE-AAC files. Other wise the software will just be playing the LC part of the HE-AAC file. This means that your 64kbps HE-AAC files will have the exact same sound quality as a 64kbps LC-AAC file. I don't think that Pocket Player has true support for HE-AAC files and neither does Windows Media Player mobile. Nero Digital Mobile does though.

I don't think that AAC files can handle ID3 tags, that is part of a different file format. I thought all AAC tags were stored as metadata instead. I could be wrong as I am no AAC technician. I do know that your software must support proper HE-AAC playback though in order for the sound files to retain their quality.

Thanks for that. Very good points re is it really using the extra HE data or just playing the regular AAC part? I guess I need to pop across to a Windows Mobile forum and see if anyone knows what AAC codec HTC adds into the Windows build and go and see if that does support HE-AAC. It's of somewhat academic interest though because whatever the codec is playing, I'm happy with the quality, but if that quality is coming from regular AAC then I might as well just encode it as such.

I'm pretty sure that neither PocketPlayer nor Windows Media Player Mobile play any form of AAC but they both do on my smartphone because they seem to pick up the AAC codec that HTC added into their ROM. Nero Mobile is one of the players I tried on my device and it is the only one that did correctly see the tags and build a proper artist/album/genre library structure but unfortunately the user interface and features in the rest of the program are hopeless (e.g. can't even blank the screen while it's playing, or at list I couldn't work out how to do this) so I found it unusable.

- Julian