Adva Mobile's Blog

MP3 or M4A (AAC) - Now Your Choice

We've made an important change to your Adva Mobile service. Now, you can upload MP3 files to your mobile web pages.

Since we started, we've always required uploaded music to be in .m4a format (also acalled AAC) - the format used by Apple and iTunes. Most phones played .m4a, and it was easy to convert most other formats, including MP3, into .m4A using iTunes on your computer. Not all phones played MP3.

Some new phones now accept MP3 and also allow you to save the music as a song or a ringtone. This is a great way for you to offer ringtones to your fans by uploading MP3 files of short duration - 30 seconds - and have fans save the file as a ringtone. Phones that allow this automatically save the file in the right ringtome format and in the correct folder.

One issue is iPhones. The iPhone only plays m4a. Most of your iPhone users know that you can't save a song you uploaded to your mobile site - you can stream it, but can't save it. So one drawback to this new MP3 format choice is that many phones now have flexibility with how you save music, but it doesn't work on iPhones.

Over time, all these incompatibilities will dissolve. Remember early PC days, when you had Windows Media, Quicktime, Real Player, etc. You needed the player for each file type. Right now, phones play only specific file types, but this will standardize.