Interested in receiving music on your cell phone? I recently received this email from Rusty Hodge, the General Manager of SomaFM.com in San Francisco. SomaFM is listener-supported, commercial-free, underground/alternative radio broadcasting from San Francisco. Rusty wrote:
I read your article about Mspot Puts 8 Channels of Commercial-Free Music on Sprint PCS Vision Phones and wanted to let you know that there are other sources for commercial free music on phones.
SomaFM has been supporting Sprint's "3GPP" multimedia phones (Sanyo MM-7400, MM-5600 and Samsung MMA700 phones) since May, 2005. We offer 3 of our commercial free radio channels on our 3GPP service for no additional charge if you already have a Sprint internet access plan.
We also offer radio stream formats that are compatible with newer smart phones that include the Windows Media Player, and the Treo phones with Pocket Player.
However, the sound quality on the 3GPP streams which use an encoding format called "aacPlus" is by far the best quality. This is the same audio codec that XM satellite radio use, only most of XM's channels are at lower bitrates and hence lower quality than our 3GPP aacPlus stream.
You'll be surprised at how good radio over your 3GPP phone can sound - even better than satellite radio!
