Samsung SGH-T629

Heard nothing but great things about this phone. My buddy got one and I was impressed with it completely, so I got one myself mainly for the fact that it looks great and can play some of my favorite mp3's. Along with the phone I got a Kingston 2GB MicroSD card so that my Samsung T629 phone could play up to 500 of my favorite songs. Well the problem I first faced was that the phone didn't recognize mp3's encoded higher than 128kbps. A few would play with bit rates higher than that, but not most. A lot of other CNET members have had similar issues that I've read about on the forums. So to get around this, I used BlazeMedia Pro to re-encode all the mp3's I wanted to play on the phone to the quality of 128kbps.

The problem is, after I transfered all 496 mp3's to the Music folder on my microSD card, when I insert it in the phone, it doesn't show that there are any mp3's stored on my memory card. It makes no sense. I've tried re-encoding all the mp3's to a lower bitrate, to 96kbps, and still, shows the Music folder on my memory card as being empty, even though there are in fact 496 mp3's stored in that folder. I've tried moving the mp3's to other folders, like the Sounds and Other folders, but still not registered as showing that the memory card has any mp3's stored on it. This has grown quite frustrating for me since I have dished out a lot of money on the phone and accessories (phone $90 after rebate, 2 GB memory card $25, handsfree headset adapter so that I could plug in regular headphones to the phone $12, and a phone protector for $12). Has anyone had similar problems with storing a lot of songs on their microSD memory card? I hear Kingston is one of the best microSD card's around, so I have a hard time thinking there is something wrong with my actual card. Plus I've stored about 20 songs on the phone with no problems at all, but ever since I put all 496 songs on it, it's showing that there are no mp3's on it.

There are two reasonable conclusions I can come to from this. One is that when I re-encoded the mp3's, it made them unrecognizable to the phone. If anyone knows of a great re-encoding program that could re-encode my mp3's to a format recognizable by the phone (by that I mean that it actually shows there are mp3's in the Music folder and that they can play and not show the Unrecognized Format error), please respond and let me know!

The second conclusion I come to is that maybe the phone can only handle so many songs per memory card. This would be sort of weird, however it can be likely. Does anybody know if there is an actual limit of how many mp3's one can keep in their music folder, or is this problem just original to me? Also, I'm interested in hearing the most amount of mp3's someone was able to store on their microSD memory card without having any problems.

I truly appreciate all the help I can get with my problem! This phone is a beauty and I would truly feel I wasted so much money if I weren't able to get my mp3's to play on it.

Thanks so much in advance..