How to put music on to your phone

The way mobile phones have progressed over the last few years has seen what was once a chunky device becoming one of the must have accessories of today. Phones have gone from being a simple communication tool used to make calls and send short messages (SMS) to being a multifaceted tool that can act like mini-computers. It seems like everything you can do with a computer you can pretty much do with a mobile phone, from browsing the internet and using social networks to using office based software and opening PDF's. From work to entertainment you can use your phone for anything today, though one of the big questions is how do I get my phone to do this, or that?

Here we are going to look at 2 methods of putting your music tracks onto your phone from your PC, helping to turn your phone into a multimedia player. The phone in question here is the HTC Wildfire though most phones will have a similar set of methods to put music from your computer or laptop onto your mobile.

Firstly the most simple method is using a USB Cable to directly connect the phone and the computer. This method is by far the quickest and will allow you to move a vast quantity of tracks swiftly and easily. This method is also the easiest to delete tracks you want off your phone. To do this you will have to connect your phone to the computer by a USB cable and select the correct option on the phone. On the HTC wildfire the correct option for a USB connection is “Disk Drive” on the Samsung Wave it's “DRM Media” and it's similar sort of option across the board. When the phones are connected you can just go into the “My Computer” section and open the device to drag and drop (or copy and paste) whatever tracks you want to move into the music folder. It really is something that any computer user should be able to do with out any problems at all.

As we don't always have a USB cable with us we may need to find an alternative way to put a track on to our phone. An alternative to using a USB cable is to do it wirelessly, the most common wireless method is by bluetooth. In the past you could connect laptops to mobile phones via Infrared Data Association (IrDA) though this has been phased out in recent times in favour of bluetooth which is more versatile and simpler. To send a file to a phone by bluetooth you will need to turn the bluetooth setting on on your phone and make the phone “visible”. You will need to connect your phone to the laptop or USB pen drive before you can transfer files, which is again done by dragging and dropping or copy and pasting.

Connect the phone and laptop by the cable to begin with then select “Disk Drive” at the prompt on the phone. If you aren't prompted to select an option you may need to manually select the USB connect type. To do this you need to go to the home screen and click menu, then click settings. On the settings screen you need to scroll down to the “Connect to PC” and click that then “Default connection type” then choose “Disk Drive”.
After you have connected the phone to the computer/laptop you will see an autoplay type of screen (as seen in the picture to the side of this paragraph) you can either click on the “Open folder to view files” option or open the device through “My computer” (or equivalent). Then find the phones “Music” folder and copy what ever songs you want from your computer into this folder. This will allow you to play the tracks through the inbuilt music player or a downloaded media playing app such as Sunmer Player.

In the case of needing to use bluetooth things are slightly more complicated though once you have detected the phone and connected it it's plain sailing.

Where many phones do differ is WHERE they store the media. In the case of the HTC Wildfire and many Android phones you will need a memory card in the device to put your music on to rather than the handset. Many other phones including the Samsung Wave, the Sony Ericsson C902 and a catalogue of others however allow you to store music (amongst other files) on the handset or on a memory card. Though this really shouldn't make a difference unless you haven't got a memory card in a phone that needs one it is worth knowing that you can store them in either location.