Sony Ericsson

[#1]

I just got my phone on the 29th of September and was so excited! My fiance has an unlocked one from Germany where she was living and I just fell in love with this phone. Finally a really nice phone from Cingular that I can live with. I have several Sony products so the use of Memory Sticks is great. After putting a 1gb stick into my new phone and downloading some of my favorite mp3s I found a problem, you can't make your mp3s as ringtones. You get the following error "Can not use file". Did a Google search and found out that several other people are experiencing the same problem. I'm hoping someone on here can provide a solution to this as my Fiances phone from Germany doesn't have this problem. I love my phone but this is just wrong that I can't make my own ringtone with my mp3s. Please help. Thanks.

Message Edited by djsnafu on 10-01-200607:02:06 PM

Message Edited by djsnafu on 10-01-200611:10:27 PM

[#2]

Called customer support and they informed me that we have to purchase their MP3s and cannot use our own personal MP3s on our phones as ringtones. Thats kind of a bummer... but I tried something today that worked and I hope it helps anyone else who purchases this phone. I encoded the file again but small in length and bit rate. I took a 5 minute song and only choose the parts I wanted for the ringtone, 50 seconds in length. Then encoded it at several different rates and found anything under 112Kbps works, 112 and up doesn't work and is greyed out. 96Kbps is what I'm using at the moment and works great. There is hope!

[#3]

If you have a USB cable or the MEdia Net package, you can download the MP3 to your phone directly, but must DRM the file. A good tutorial is located at:

http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000521.php

[#4]

I tried the DRM idea on my Cingular w810i and it didn't work.  The mp3 plays but the ability to set as a ringtone has been removed.

[#5]

I used Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) to cut down the mp3's to the 30 seconds or so I want for the ringtone and export them using 128kbps encoding.  The files come out to be about 500-600k and work fine as ringtones.  I believe the limit is 600k, so you cannot set any file over 600k as a ringtone.  I haven't tried any DRM stuff, so I do not know firsthand if that works.

[#6]

I can verify what Crazyman6000 mentioned.  I used Creative's Wave Studio that came with my sound card to cut the file down to 37secs and 112 sample rate.  Made the file around 587k which allowed me to select it as a ringtone.  Hope it helps.

[#7]

Hi,
   I have W300i, which also has the same problem of mp3 ringtones, but a hint from the cingular store
representative clicked my mind as others have already tried on this forum.
i.e cut down the length of your mp3 to around 1 min and size less than 1 MB. . yes, it works till 1 min even on my W300i.
Also about bit rate, i have tried several combinations, i have been able to set ringtones of size till 1.1 MB and lenght 1 min max
with bit rate of 168 kbps max.

Hope this helps.
I will be still working on DRM method, if i can play the whole song as ringtone. My friend has cingular 8125
and he can play the whole song as ringtone without any problem of cutting the songs. It seems its just that
cingular has put this limitation on all Walkman phones.

Btw, W300i is also an awesome phone and capable of giving fight to W810i except the camera part.

Cheers!!!

[#8]

FYI, unbranded W810's don't have this problem. I am again convinced never to purchase a phone directly through Cingular.

[#9]

Thank God I bought an unlocked phone.

[#10]

Why won't this work? I called Cingular and they were totally useless.  I was told when I bought the phone that I would be able to use my music as my ringtones and thus far, I have not been successful at making this happen.  Can anyone list a simple way to do this?? Or is it just not possible..........

thank you