Let's admit it. Sony's SonicStage – the default music player software that is supplied with any Sony HD Walkman or Net MD Walkman – is hardly anything to rave about. In fact, it pales in comparison to Apple's iTunes with regards to ease of use, and more significantly, support of Unicode data.

When I first fired up SonicStage, I was peeved at the fact that the software didn't seem to recognize MP3s that are named in Chinese characters; try dragging-and-dropping such an MP3 into SonicStage and you'd realize it will not accept the file.

Apparently, SonicStage is a non-Unicode program, meaning it will not display characters outside of what your version was localized for. In order for your, say, English version of SonicStage to display Chinese characters, you'd need to do the following:

1) Download the Microsoft AppLocale software. Quite simply, Microsoft's AppLocale tricks a non-Unicode program into thinking it is running off any given localized version of the Windows OS. Hence, here in our case, we're going to use AppLocale to tell SonicStage it is running on a Chinese Windows OS.

2) I have a bunch of MP3s previously named and tagged in iTunes; as you know, iTunes uses Unicode characters to name album folders and song filenames. If you want to import these songs into SonicStage, you'd have to rename such folders and files in English first. Don't worry, though; the ID3 tags in the MP3s will be preserved, meaning the Chinese titles/artist's names/album names will remain.

3) Fire up Microsoft AppLocale and choose SonicStage as the application to run (the executable should be "omgjbox.exe"). Choose either Simplified or Traditional Chinese, depending on your case.

4) Now, SonicStage should display all Chinese song titles et al correctly. If you're like me, you probably have some Japanese songs as well, of which their characters will not display correctly (you'd probably get something like "?????"). No worries; as long as the filenames are in English, you'd be able to import them, and later if you transfer over to your mobile device, the Japanese characters will display correctly.

5) If, again, you're like me, and you use iTunes and Apple's Airport Express to stream music wirelessly, you'd be opening iTunes again, and you'd notice that all the songs you had renamed will be unlinked. Simply relink those songs again and you are sorted.

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