Someday I'll Figure Out What This is About

Interested in making custom ringtones out of your favourite MP3s for you Motorola KRZR? Here’s all you have to do:

1. Use the Motorola Phone Tools software that came with your phone to make a < 20-second clip of your favourite tune and save it as a new MP3
2. Send the new MP3 to your phone
3. Find it in your phones list of tunes and choose “Apply as Ringtone”

That’s all there is to it!

HAHA! Just kidding…

That’s all that should be involved (and that’s all the instructions from Motorola imply is involved), but chances are pretty good that your service provider has locked down the phone so that you’ll never see that “Apply as Ringtone” option in step three unless you select a ringtone you’ve paid them for. But with a little bit of not-to-drastic trickery, you can hook yourself up with whatever tracks you want.

Before you follow any of the instructions below, I’ll say the following: doing any of the things below may violate your service agreement with your service provider and while I think it unlikely, I can’t promise that you won’t wreck your phone if something goes wrong. I’m not an expert on cell phones, I just followed the instructions I found on the internet for other phones, and they worked for the KRZR K1M.

With the warnings out of the way, I’ll say that the process is actually pretty simple and doesn’t require doing anything frightening like flashing your phone or twiddling bits. The instructions I followed came from Mark Venture’s Site. Even though most of the pages don’t include specific instructions for the K1M, the basic process works the same as for other phones:

• Install Motorola’s Update Software, following the instructions here.
• Download and install P2KCommander 3.2.2, following the instructions here. Other (newer) versions of P2KCommander probably work as well, but I haven’t tried them.
• Use P2KCommander to access your phone’s filesystem and convince it to recognize your custom ring tones as detailed here, keeping in mind the notes below.

You can use whatever process you like to actually get your would-be-ringtones onto your phone; the easiest way is probably to just use the included software from Motorola to copy MP3s over as you normally would, but you can also use P2KCommander if you’re comfortable with it. Once you’ve got your MP3s on the phone, you just need to tweak their file attributes, delete the MyToneDB.db file and then power off and on your phone, causing it to recreate MyToneDB.db and include your new ringtones.

I think that there is a 20-second limit on the length of MP3s that can be used as ringtones, but I may be mistaken. If you find that longer ones work, let me know.

Note that Mark has a special note about the K1M, stating that ringtones need to be placed in “a/motorola/shared/ringtones”. This didn’t apply on my phone (ringtones just went in “a/motorola/shared/audio” with the other MP3s), so this may be specific to your service provider. I did follow the instructions about modifying the file attributes, though I don’t know if this was necessary or not.

The one drawback to this approach, as Mark’s instructions point out, is that it will screw up which rings you have associated with the different ring styles, or specific callers. It’s easy enough to go through and reset these (assuming you haven’t set up a unique ringtone for 50 different callers), but you may want to do your ringtones in batches so you can minimize the amount of work you need to do.

If everything goes well, after your phone’s restarted you should have access to all of your new ringtones.