My cellphone is a basic picture phone. Nothing really fancy. It has 50 megabytes of memory on the phone and 30 megs on the mini SD card. All for a grand total of 80megs. Not a whole lot of space. So I got to thinking about ways to get more for my megabyte.

The answer was simple.

It isn’t hard to store more songs on your mobile devices. All you really need to do is make lower bitrate versions of each of the songs that you rip onto your computer. One for your PC and one for your mobile device. Yeah yeah. I’m encouraging ripping music off CDs. Its your CD and you can listen to it on whatever device you want to.

The standard bitrate for mp3 encoding is usually between 192 - 128 kylobits per second. That is near CD quality. You can definitely push this. An mp3 encoded at 48 Kbits/S will be somewhere near FM radio quality. When I was stuck behind a dial-up internet connection, I did SHOUTcast radio at a bitrate of 32 kb/s. It didn’t sound terrible.

So whip out your favorite mp3 encoder/ripper. A good one is lame mp3 encoder. Windows Media Player will not encode at a lower bitrate than 128kb/s. To get your squeeze on with this you will have to use something else. Another good start is Google.

If you files are already in mp3 format you may have to get more creative. One thing that might work is Zamzar.