Corrupt ringtone bug in stock sprint rom

christophocles · #1 (**permalink**) 10-08-2009, 04:59 AM

OK, The Sprint stock ROM on the TP2 is driving me insane! I take so much abuse from this %$@#%#* phone I seriously want to return it now.. I've been waiting for HardSPL to try an alternate ROM but my 30 days are almost up and I don't think I can take this any longer.

My phone, after some unspecified period of time, stopped playing ringtones. It is simply unable to play MP3 or WMA files AT ALL. When I go to select a ringtone and press "done" I get the error message "RING TONE ERROR - THIS RING TONE FILE IS CORRUPTED OR UNAVAILABLE. PLEASE CHOOSE A DIFFERENT RINGTONE". But notification sounds, which I think are .wav, still seem to play. Then I noticed that the Music app in TouchFlo no longer works. Then I noticed that if I explore to \Windows and try to start wmplayer.exe, NOTHING HAPPENS! WMPLAYER has destroyed itself somehow.

I already had this happen to me once and I was unable to fix it and had to hard reset. Well now a week later it has happened again! If you ask me, having to hard reset the phone twice in two weeks is seriously pathetic. Does anyone know more about this? What could be causing it? How can I fix it without hard resetting?

I read somewhere it might have something to do with .NET CF 3.5, which I did install. Is there any truth to this? If so, WTF is wrong with Microsoft?? I thought of all the software I could install THIS should be safe. God I am so pissed off right now, its too late for me to fix it tonight so I will go without the ability to HEAR THE PHONE RINGING all day tomorrow.

Please help.

**freeza** · #2 (**permalink**) 10-08-2009, 05:02 AM

Happened to me too once and I couldn't figure out for the life of me why.....

At any rate I figured it was due to a setting I changed with some tweaks program..

Could never verify it though and ultimately had to hard reset as well.

bmrisko · #3 (**permalink**) 10-08-2009, 08:22 AM

Mine just started doing this exact same thing this morning as well. I got a call around 7am and it worked fine. Went to turn my phone to vibrate an about an hour later and I started getting the corrupted ringtone message. A soft reset seems to have cured it for now...

mountainwampus · #4 (**permalink**) 10-08-2009, 09:09 AM

I don't have any answers, but I did install .NET CF 3.5 without any issues. Did you adjust file associations with a 3rd party music player? I know Coreplayer will mess up WMP if you select certain file associations.

christophocles · #5 (**permalink**) 10-08-2009, 06:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mountainwampus

I don't have any answers, but I did install .NET CF 3.5 without any issues. Did you adjust file associations with a 3rd party music player? I know Coreplayer will mess up WMP if you select certain file associations.

OK I still couldn't figure out what went wrong but I did install CorePlayer and I did mess with some file associations. I don't think the Media Player issue happened right away after I did that, though. It just randomly started one day (maybe after a soft reset after changing these settings....). I have hard reset again and I won't install .NET CF or CorePlayer. At least not until I have confirmation from someone about what actually causes this. I've seen some ROMS that say "fixed corrupt ringtone bug" but I've never seen an explanation or a .cab that will fix it.

I actually need CorePlayer because I like to stream videos over wifi at home, but I will live without it to see if I still get this terrible, crippling bug. I hate how windows media player is so tightly integrated with the OS that if it fails, basic phone functions stop working. That's MS for you...

**Darkness231** · #6 (**permalink**) 10-18-2009, 10:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mountainwampus

I don't have any answers, but I did install .NET CF 3.5 without any issues. Did you adjust file associations with a 3rd party music player? I know Coreplayer will mess up WMP if you select certain file associations.

I was having issues with my custom ring-tones just not playing. I tried WAV , MP3 and WMA and all were having the same issue.

When I un-associated all file types with Coreplayer then my problem stopped.

Does anybody know which file extension association that causes the problem?

christophocles · #7 (**permalink**) 10-18-2009, 12:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darkness231

I was having issues with my custom ring-tones just not playing. I tried WAV , MP3 and WMA and all were having the same issue.

When I un-associated all file types with Coreplayer then my problem stopped.

Does anybody know which file extension association that causes the problem?

I never managed to fix the problem by removing CorePlayer associations, so I ended up doing a hard reset. I'm afraid to reinstall CorePlayer now but I do have .NET CF and the problem hasn't come up again. This time I will be prepared with a Spritebackup and maybe I could restore system files to fix it...

EDIT: CorePlayer is installed and ringtones are still intact after numerous soft-resets. I left file associations alone and never touched the defaults. My guess is you can't associate CorePlayer with MP3, WMA, or any other windows-formats.

christophocles · #8 (**permalink**) 10-19-2009, 06:52 PM

OK, It happened to me again today! I was tweaking the phone a bit yesterday and before I went to bed, media player and ringtones still worked. This morning when my G-Alarm went off it did not make any sound. I knew immediately what had happened. It seems like the combination of Coreplayer + G-Alarm causes the bug.

This time, I had used Sprite backup to save all of my "system settings" which includes all of the files on the main phone memory as well as many registry keys (~150mb). I saved a Sprite backup both before AND after the ringtone bug happened.

--Restoring the older Sprite backup did NOTHING. Media player still would not start and the mp3 and wma ringtones still would not play.

--After a hard-reset, I restored the Sprite backup from AFTER the bug happened. This did not cause the bug again. So whatever is causing it is not a file on the Main memory of the phone and it is not in any of the registry keys that Sprite backs up. Interesting...

I think my next step will be to save the entire registry in a text format (.reg) from before and after the bug and compare them to find out what has changed. It MUST be in there somewhere....

But for now, I am happy with all of my apps and data restored with minimal effort. Instead of Coreplayer, I am using good old TCPMP which seems to be working great so far..

**Darkness231** · #9 (**permalink**) 10-19-2009, 07:17 PM

I removed the following associations from coreplayer and my problem stopped. (All my ringtones/sounds are in .wav format)

Windows Media Audio files (WMA)
Windows metafiles (ASX,WMX,WVX,WAX)
WavPack (WV)
BMP files (BMP) (Resco photo)
JPEG files (JPG,JPEG) (Resco photo)
MIDI Tuny Engine (MIDI)
MMS protocal
PNG files (PNG)(Resco photo)
RSS feeds (RSS,XML)
TIFF files (TIF,TIFF)(Resco photo)

Whats interesting is that WAV files are still associated with coreplayer and I don't have any issues anymore.

Mutiny32 · #10 (**permalink**) 10-19-2009, 07:26 PM

I've had enough of this phone. HSPL isn't a valid solution since that voids warranty.