Play music on your W710i

Playing music is one of the highlights of the Walkman-branded Sony Ericsson phones. The player supports MP3, MP4, 3GP, AAC, AAC AMR, IMY, EMY and WAV files.

Music files are loaded onto the phone using the USB mass storage mode – see “Copying Music and Images to/from the phone” or using the supplied Disc2Phone application (which can convert your CDs to play on the phone).

Starting the player is as simple as pressing either the start-stop button on the outside of the phone, or the W-branded Walkman button to the bottom left of the keypad inside. Alternatively, going to the Walkman menu (go to the main menu, highlight Walkman and click Select) (Figure 1) gives you more control of your playlists, and allows you to select tracks to play by artist or title (Figure 2).

The standard headphones are of reasonable quality and include clips to hold them on your ears during exercise, but if you have a favourite pair you can use the in conjunction with the provided 3.5mm adaptor. You can tailor the sound to your earphones and taste using the Equalizer – which has several presets or can be manually tweaked – or using the stereo widening option.

Playing a track
To play a track, simply highlight Artists or Tracks in the Walkman menu, click Open (Figure 3), highlight the track you want to hear and click Play (Figure 4).

Creating a playlist
To build a playlist of your favourite tracks, from the main Walkman menu, highlight Playlists and click Open. Highlight New playlist and click Add. You can now use the keypad to type the name of your playlist. When complete, click OK and you’ll be taken to the Add media screen.

Add media displays the sound files available to you. Highlight a track you want to add, and click Mark so a tick appears in the checkbox to the right of the song title. When you’ve marked all the tracks you want to add, click Add and the additional tracks will be added to the playlist.

To add an entire album or all the tracks by a particular artist – and providing your music files are organised properly – highlight an artist or album folder name and click Mark to add a tick into its checkbox. Then click More, highlight Add and click Select to confirm the addition.

Shuffle and Loop
Your playlists or albums will be default be played in the order listed, but you can play the tracks in random order by selecting Shuffle, or replay an entire playlist over and over again by activating Loop mode.
To turn on Shuffle and Loop, press More in the main Walkman screen, choose Settings (Figure 5) and Play mode (Figure 6), press Select and switch Shuffle or Loop on. Shuffle plays the songs in a playlist in a random order, while Loop plays them in the order they were queued, returning to the first track at the end of the playlist.

Improve the sound quality
When a track is playing, you can adjust the equalizer levels to improve the sound quality. Press More in the Walkman screen, highlight Settings, click the right nav key, highlight Equalizer and press Select (Figure 7). You can choose whichever seems most appropriate to the type of music you’re listening to, but it is worth noting that ‘Mega Bass’ is a special setting designed to improve audio for higher quality headphones and Sony Ericsson’s own packaged earphones.

You can manually set the equalizer’s audio levels by pressing Manual, and using the up and down nav keys to change the audio channels in turn; use the left and right nav keys to move between channels. The sound will change as you highlight each setting; press Select to return to Walkman mode when you’re happy with the equalizer setting.