Current Mood: Borg-like

I got my new phone (Motorola Rival) and decided (naturally) that I didn’t like the stock ringtones, so installed the Motorola Phone Tools in order to take care of that.

The first problem I had was that the software said it didn’t support my operating system.  I thought the problem might be that I’m using a 64-bit version of Windows 7, so I installed the software on my 32-bit Win7 installation on my laptop…same problem.

I eventually found this page that explained I should download the 64-bit drivers from here.  Installed it, the phone was detected by Windows properly…problem solved, right?

WRONG (and you knew it from this posting’s title).

I was able to get into Motorola’s software, but when trying to use the Melody Editor to upload the MP3 file I wanted to use as a ringtone, it indicated that I needed a codec, and that I could pay Motorola for it.  Screw that, I said, and downloaded the Lame MP3 encoder.  No difference.

I eventually found this page that explained that I had to edit a registry key (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32\msacm.l3acm=C:\Windows\System32\l3codecp.acm) in order to point the OS to use a slightly different codec file than the default one (which is usually l3codeca.acm).  After a reboot, it…still didn’t work.

Then I remembered that since since the Motorola Phone Tools was running as a 32-bit app and I was using a 64-bit operating system, I had to edit the 32-bit registry and have it point to the 32-bit Windows System folder, so the regkey I really had to edit was HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32\msacm.l3acm=C:\Windows\SysWOW64\l3codecp.acm.  After a reboot, the software was no longer complaining about a missing codec.

Oh, but it doesn’t end there…

I uploaded my MP3 file via the Melody Editor, but it put the file into my MP3 folder, so I could only play it as a song…it didn’t appear in my ringtones folder.  What’s worse, there didn’t seem to be a ringtones folder, but online sources said there should be one.

I eventually found this page, which reminded me that Telus sucks.  They’ve crippled the phone to disallow custom ringtones; you have to buy ringtones from them.  However, further down the page there were instructions on using a freeware program called P2KCommander to connect to the phone and access all the hidden folders, including /a/brew/mod/my_ringers, where the ringtones are stored!

The program isn’t exactly user friendly, but once I figured it out and uploaded the file, I could see my Mp3 in the ringtones list!

Elapsed time:  4 hours