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mp3 codec huh

March 29th, 2008 | tech

I have a Motorola Razr. There are +’s and -’s to the phone, but it’s not too bad. I also have Motorola’s Phone Tools software. Using this I can easily transfer photos to and from phone, resize photos so they fit on the wallpaper of my phone, and I can usually take mp3s of songs…crop them…and make them into ringtones.

For awhile now I’ve had Kasabian’s song “Empire” as my ringtone, the chorus part. In the past I’ve used the intro to Bloc Party’s “Banquet” and a couple other songs. For a couple days now I’ve been wanting to use one part of the last track on Battles’ album. So I opened Phone Tools. Oops, updates, so click yeah.

While updates are installing I get a nice little message saying software isn’t confirmed by Microsoft and if I continue it will harm my computer now or in near future. Choices are continue anyways, or stop. I clicked stop…the installation kept going. huh? oh well.

Updates installed, connect phone, find song on computer, crop song…good. Save cropped mp3 to computer: NOPE. file is invalid (or something like that). So I try skipping the save to computer part, I’ll just transfer the file to phone. ERROR…invalid codec. umm codec what? So I tried another approach. Save the cropped file as a .WAV, then go into the file transfer part of Phone Tools and transfer it to phone. For some reason saving as .WAV works fine. Next, transfer to phone. Ugh, files must be mp3, not wav.

After about an hour searching Motorola’s poorly designed help sections I learn a lil bit about codec and that there are many kinds. It says Phone Tools relies on codecs from Windows Media Player. If I’m having problems, make sure WMP is up to date. So next step, I check my WMP expecting to find updates I didn’t know about available. What do I find? “All updates and codecs are up to date”. hmmm, if I have the codecs, and Phone Tools uses codec from WMP, why won’t the program work?

After searching through help forums for the majority of the night (about 5 hours) I gave up. I still don’t know what I’m looking for, or where to find the specific codec I need. What’s really frustrating is that I’ve used Phone Tools before and it worked. Then I remembered the updates.

In a last ditch effort I uninstall the updates. Program still doesn’t work. So why not, I uninstall Phone Tools and reinstall the whole thing. Still doesn’t work and now half of the menus don’t even appear. Crap, things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse. Ahhh another idea…the HP.

I remembered I put Phone Tools on the HP desktop computer. I sent my original mp3 files to myself on email to transfer them to HP. Open Phone Tools. Install updates? NO THANKS…continue. Find my song, crop song. Save song. What? Yep that’s right, worked first try. Next I click “transfer to phone”. No error comes up…brilliant. A simple window appears for me to name my file and within 3 seconds my new ringtone is on my phone. Hooray!

The main problem here is 1. I primarily use my laptop. 2. the one computer Phone Tools won’t work on is my laptop. 3. I have no idea how to fix the problem.

/rant

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