I have just bought a Sony Erikson W800i and have set about putting music on it.

I have a Mac so can't use the supplied Disc2Phone software but have to drag and dop files manually - I've no problem with this, intrinsically.

So... I wanted to move a song called Truth to the phone. I used iTunes to convert a song I wanted on the phone from the Mac's AAC format to an MP3. So far so good. I then opened the Audio folder on the phone's memory stick and created there a new folder for the artist, and a folder inside that for the album, and copied the MP3 file there.

I then went to the phone's menu and found that the phone thought there were two tracks available... one called Truth, the other ._Truth.mp3

If I try to play ._Truth.mp3 I get a message saying "Playback failed" and the whole phone hung... I could only get it to do anything by taking the battery out. If I play the track Truth... it plays normally.

Anyone know what's going on?

Thanks!

I'll try and have a look at mine when I get home...it's a 750i but I assume should work very similar. Have you tried just copying a single track with a name like test.mp3 over and seeing what happens.

Were the AAC tunes bought through iTunes as they'll be copy protected possibly? Also finally just try ripping a CD directly as MP3 and see what happens there.

The ._blah files are a Mac way of saving information about usefull files. They are hidden on the mac itself but phones and other machines (such as ones running Windows) can see them and they are very annoying :(

Thanks for both those answers.

Probedb - I think what you suggest - copying a single file - is effectively what I have done. I generally don't buy music from iTunes - it's all ripped from my own CDs. I will try ripping as MP3 directly as suggested.

adaline- I didn' t know about the ._blah files. They are certainly annoying!!

Some phones need the mp3 files to be encoded at a certain bit rate, or they fail. I have lots of music on my samsung D500 it is very good, and seems to play anything, but when I send the mp3s to my brother's nokia, they won't play because his have to be encoded at 128k.
I am certain that this is what you have done.

I have just read a review of your phone on the internet, and someone is talking about saving mp3 files to it at 64k, which isn't top notch quality for music, but should work.

Perhaps i didnt explain myself properly...

Mac OS stores information about files.
These files start with "._" and followed by the name of the file refered to.
They are useless evrywhere, expet on ur Mac.

If you want to not have them on your phone:

Delete them using phones file manager.
OR
Delete them using a Windows computer.

OK well I just copied an MP3 into the MP3 directory of the SD card that's in the phone...this was by connecting the phone.

Phone is connected to a WinXP Pro computer via USB and the MP3 was encoded using LAME.

Went into the file manager of the phone, then to audio and it was listed fine, played fine as well.

I noticed there's an audio directory somewhere on the SD card, but I put it in the MP3 dir which is in the root of the card.

Have you tried just encoding a track directly as MP3 and trying that?