It has been ages since I blogged about my Nokia 6300. In my posts and comments, I've always mentioned that I was able to put songs almost similar to the quality of the songs that I usually play at my pc but having only half or a third the original file size. Since then, many requested a step-by-step tutorial on how to convert mp3's to another file format that would have these attributes. The real secret with this method is with the software that I use to convert mp3's. And I convert mp3's into wma's (Windows Media Audio), is also the file format used when you rip audio CD's using Windows Media Player.

For this step by step guide, you need to install GoldWave first,  which is the application that we will be using to convert mp3's to wma's. Although it is not free, it is worth more than you'll be paying for. And also, you need to have some mp3 files that we will be converting into wma.

Step-by-Step Guide

• Once you have GoldWave installed, launch the program by clicking start - All Programs - GoldWave - GoldWave. You should see something like below.

• This time click File and select Batch Processing. Another window would appear something looking like this.

• Now, first things first. You must add mp3s to convert in your Files and folders to process dialog. Click Add Files if you want to convert say 3 to 5 mp3 files. But if you want to have an entire folder of mp3 files converted to wma, then choose Add Folder - after all, the name of this window is Batch Processing, converting 3-5 mp3 files would hardly fit the word batch.
• After adding the mp3 files, click Convert files to this format and choose wma in Save as type. For the Attributes, select WMA 9.2, 32 kbps, 44 khz, stereo CBR. Refer to the screenshot below for details.

• Click the Folder tab. This option will give you the choice to place the converted files to the directory where the original mp3 files are saved or to have all the converted files in a single directory that you have defined. Say for the settings that I have below, I have chosen to save all the wma's to a folder in my pc called TEMP in drive D:\ (See the screenshot below). This is a good option if you have mp3 files coming from different directories in your pc and want all of these converted to wma's in a single batch. Once you are done with these settings, then click Begin and wait for the conversion to finish.

• After the completion of the conversion process, you can now navigate to the pc directory where you saved your wma's. Using a USB cable or bluetooth, you can then copy these files to your Nokia 6300. You are done. But make sure when you start using 6300's audio player, do a refresh of the audio files first, because there is a good chance that your phone did not automatically add the new wma's in the list.

Well, that's about it. I hope somebody out there would find this tutorial helpful. For comments, suggestions or clarifications, please post a comment, I am sure I will be reading all of it.

NOTE: WMA audio format is also supported by Creative mp3 players. So if you have one, you can convert your mp3's to wma and save disk space. I've even placed almost 450 songs in my 512 MB Muvo player. Just check it out, you would not notice the difference in sound quality.