Palm and Treo Hacks

Take Charge of Ringtones

Set up your own ringtones on your Treo and skip the part where you pay your wireless provider lots of money.

Picking a ringtone can be a very emotional process, as it is perhaps the most defining personalization you can make to your Treo. You’ve probably already come across the Sound preference panel for the Phone application, as shown in Figure 5-1. And you probably were as disappointed as I was to realize that your choices are limited to the MIDI Ring Tones database, which contain cheesy MIDI sound files. You’d expect a little more from a $600 smartphone, like the ability to play MP3 or WAV files. The bad news is that you pretty much have to purchase an aftermarket application to do this, which can set you back $20 to $35, and will eat up about 700 KB of RAM on your Treo. The good news is that things work really well once you’ve made this investment.

The Treo 650 (but not the 600) has built-in support for a voice compression format: AMR on GSM Treos, and QCELP on CDMA Treos. For example, if you use the voice recorder to record yourself, the recording will be stored internally as AMR/QCELP, and will show up in the MIDI Ring Tones database. Then you can then select it as a ringtone in the Sound preference panel.

Figure 5-1. Using the built-in ringtones in the Preferences panel

Converting Sound Files

If you don’t mind the very poor sound quality, it is possible ...