Manage music on Sony Ericsson K800i with Ubuntu without Disc2phone

After a purchase of a Sony Ericsson K800i mobile phone I was keen to start loading it with music. Plugging it in by USB into my Ubuntu powered machine I was pleasantly surprised that it was just a simple drag and drop procedure.

The only problem was that when I went into the phones music player, the artists and track names were all badly corrupted. For example transferring an Orbital album, this album appeared in the music player as artists Orbita, Orbit and Orbi. It was clear that the phone was not reading the ID3 tag correctly from the mp3 file.

Trying transferring music using the Sony Disc2phone software on a friends computer, this album was transferred correctly and the Artists name was just simply Oribital. I was confused, was this something deliberate by Sony to force the use of Disc2phone? A bit of a problem for me as Disc2phone is not available for Linux and I’m not even prepared to try installing Disc2phone with Wine.

The solution was simple. The Sony Ericsson firmware on this K800i phone (maybe other Sony phones) is shit. It does not seem able to read ID3 tags encoded with UTF-8 correctly. To my surprise, if you encode your ID3 tags with UTF-16 then this phone will list your artists and track names properly.

I found a great application in Synaptic to take the pain out of editing all my mp3′s ID3 tags in my music collection called Entagged. It can search the freedb for the track listings and artists of your music, save the ID3 tag and rename the file name if needed. Best of all, we can do all this with UTF-16.