Transfer music to your W850i

Although the Sony Ericsson W850i offers an impressive all-round feature set, its heart lies in its Walkman capabilities. By transferring digital music files to its Memory Stick, your handset doubles up as a full-blown MP3 player.

Sony Ericsson provides a suite of software applications with your phone on the accompanying CD. Amongst this you’ll find the latest Disc2Phone software, designed to make transferring files to your handset a lot easier.

To start transferring files, attach your handset to your PC using the supplied USB cable. Highlight File transfer on your handset and press Select. This will cause the phone to shut down and enter File transfer mode (note: if your phone is switched off when you plug it in, it will automatically enter file transfer mode).

Now click the Disc2Phone icon on your Sony Ericsson PC Suite to launch the application (Figure 1). You will see three panes labelled Music Source, Transfer List and Phone Tracks, which display the music files in your computer, files designated for transfer and the tracks currently on your phone respectively.

By default, the Music Source will show the contents of your My Music folder on your computer, but you can use the drop down menu to navigate to any other folder containing your music. To transfer an individual file or folder, simply click on it to highlight it and then click Add (Figure 2).

Once you have built up a list of files to transfer, click on Transfer to begin the transfer (Figure 3). The W850i is only compatible with AAC, MP3, M4A and M4B files and you may have a lot of your music stored in WMA or WAV formats. Don’t worry – the Disc2Phone software automatically converts these into MP3 format when you click transfer.

There are two buttons found above the Music Source pane that you can use to speed things up. The left hand one is labelled ‘Shuffle and add to list’ and to the right is ‘Empty the music folder, shuffle and transfer’. Use these to make Disc2Phone randomly select tracks from your music folder and automatically add them to the transfer list. The right hand button will also empty your memory card first and then start the transfer automatically (Figure 4).

Tip: Even using Disc2Phone, the transfer rate can be quite slow. If you have a card reader, simply insert your Memory Stick and run the Disc2Phone software. This will make transferring files considerably faster.