Music on my phone

My LG phone allows me to use Verizon's VCast service to play music. The phone' s speakers suck, but with the headphones on, the sound quality is surprisingly good. For most songs, it's indistinguishable from the sound quality on the iPod.

I haven't actually purchased any VCast music - that strikes me as silly. Instead, I've converted music I already own with the help of a program called FreeConverter, which works surprisingly well. You can even compress the music further - I've reduced the stuff to WMA format at 44 kHz. I imagine a true audiophile would notice the difference and would probably slap me, but I'm very pleased with the results. And it's allowed me to shove 200 songs onto a 500MB chip with room to spare.

My main complaint is that the phone's VCast software is remarkably clunky. The synchronization software that allows you to send music from your PC (using Windows Media Player) doesn't actually synchronize. That is, whatever's on the sync list gets sent to the phone again, even if those songs are already on the phone. So unless you erase the songs from the phone, you'll get doubles. Very stupid. And I can't seem to create playlists. And all the music has to be in WMA format, even though 90% of the planet uses mp3. And when it comes down to it, manipulating the songs on the phone is nowhere near as convenient as on an iPod.