NW-S706F & Unicode?

[Yoni45]

I started a thread along these lines back when I got my NW-E507 a bit over a year ago, and while the S706F is being shipped, I'm wondering if there's any improvement for it to support unicode?

I know the E507 unfortunately didn't (not Hebrew characters, anyway)...

If anyone perhaps has an S70x model, perhaps someone wants to run a test for me and try to get it to display this on the player?

" שלום "

Thanks

Edited March 24, 2007 by Yoni45

[boby_us2004]

I spent almost two weeks to study the newly purchased NW-S705F and its companion SonicStage v4.3. Here are some of my discoveries:

1) The sound is really cool for listening in a noisy or quiet environment.

2) The device (I think including S706F) does support unicode. But the problem is SonicStage does not. That caused a lot fuzz and confusion among music lovers. If you can sacrifice some SonicStage features, it is definetely possible to display any language on your player. I am using Windows XP. If this is also your case, you may change existing or add new tag by clicking the file's property and summary. (Sometimes you need to open the Advanced tab to get into edit mode.) But you must remember to manually input at least one word in order to change the existing code from whatever coding into a unicode coding.

3) When you import modified song into your SonicStage, most non-English words will become "?". But don't panic. This is because the SS doesn't support unicode as I said in above 2. You just need to download the songs into your player and finally the player will display the language you input from XP.

4) I also tried other method like Microsoft Applocale. But it didn't work. If you have something new in this aspect, please kindly let me know. (boby_us2004@yahoo.com. Thank you in advance!) However, if you do used Applocale or set the XP to display your home language, then maybe the songs can be displayed in SS with the language you can recognize. But when you download them to your NW-S7xx, I can bet they will display garbage. This is because the NW-S7xx only recognize unicode or English, whereas the SS gave it the other coded language, (Chinese GB2312, for example).

5) If you carefully edit your every song in a organizing way, the NW-S7xx can be used very comfortable. For example, you may listen to the songs according to the Artists, Album, Artists/Album, Release Year, Genre or even Jacket picture. You need to do so by change the Sort option in the setting selection. So I strongly recommend you to input complete tag information for every song you like.

6) To input Jacket picture, it's a bit more tricky than it was considered to be (at least this is my experience and took me a lot of time). You usually have to entitle the Jacket picture for every song if it belong to a distinct Album/Artist pair. In other words, if there are more than two songs that belong to the same Album/Artist pair, you need only assign a Jacket picture for them once. You may assign any picture in any size in to the SS. The SS is smart enough to reduce the picture pixel size appropriate to be displayed on the play. You may put any favorite pics into the song you like as long as you observe the rule I just stated. In case you made some mistake, for example, you assigned two pictures to the same Album/Artist pair, or you forget to assign some picture to some Album/Artist pair, the SS or NW-S7xx will display default SONY jecket picture.

7) If you happen to have to use non-English the display the tag, you had better put some english acronym before the Artist name. If you do not do so, the above 6) will crash because the SS can't identify two foreign character (unocode) and treat them all as "?".

8) Now I can understand why Sony is still not supporting unicode on its SonicStage. If you are familiar with SS, you must know than there is a quick search column in which you may serach Artists by their initials. If you are using foreign langauge, it will be hard for the SS to guess what is the initial for a unicode (they have to be put into the same catergary OTHER). Although you may see some nice home language character using Artists sort if you happen not using unicode and the XP is set to display your home language as a default, all these song tag will become scrambled on the NW-S7xx.

Many people complain the language display issue for the SONY device. I have to admit this is really a big issue. But I don't see any twilight in the near future that Sony can solve it. If you want to play with Sony, you must act like a deep fan to it and are willing to devote youself on to the experience accumulating and issue solving track. After all, this is a smartly designed device that can bring you endless enjoyment.