Use artist/album info on Sony Walkman phones

Jan 06, '06 05:54:00AM

Contributed by: adrianm

I recently bought a Sony Ericsson W800i (might be the W800a in the USA). It's a splendid phone; just works with the Mac, but had to smile a bit looking at the instructions for Windows users who had to install drivers, custom software, reboot 14 times, etc.

Anyways, about copying tunes to the W800 via the USB cable. No problem. You just plug it in, then copy the files to the MSSEMC/Media files/audio/ directory on the mounted volume (called NO NAME for me). Now, whilst the W800 could read the artist, track, and album information from these files (mp3 and m4a) and display it whilst playing, it would not organise them by artist and album in the interface.

A bit of googling and I discovered that the Windows software on the CD (Disc2Phone) does some "magic" to make this happen. But it turns out that this "magic" is just that Disc2Phone just puts songs in artist/album sub-directories. So, to the hint.

When copying your files to the phone's memory stick, organise them by artist/album, and all will be well. That is, create directory Eminem in MSSEMC/Media files/audio/, then create Curtain Call within that, and the songs in the Curtain Call directory. I've almost got an AppleScript that does this automatically for songs in a specific iTunes playlist, and will make it public when done (unless someone has done it before).

And before everyone starts shouting "get an iPod!"; thanks, but I already have one!

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