MOTORAZR v3c and the Mac - Adding ringtones

I hate ringtones. Sing-song sounds coming out of people’s pockets is not my idea of amusement - a phone ringing is jarring enough, but it’s magnified a thousand-fold when one is forced to listen to 45 seconds of sprightly latino music blaring as loud as a little 1" speaker can possibly blast it before the phone’s owner wakes up and takes the call. However! Some custom ringtones actually sound like a phone ringing.

I wanted my new phone to sound like the phones at CTU on the television show ‘24’, just for the hell of it. Most everyone is unaware of how to add custom ringtones to a MOTORAZR without Windows based utilities. It doesn’t take much to do it with a Mac (or even Linux). All you need to do is pair the phone with your Mac and upload an mp3 file with a bitrate not higher than 160kbps and not longer than 30 seconds to the phone using bluetooth file transfer.

Next, download BitPim. This app is actually pretty shoddy. I couldn’t get it to function properly with the phone over bluetooth, so I connected the phone to my Mac via a USB cable. Don’t try uploading files or getting info from the phone other than its OS version - nothing else seems to work predictably or at all. Choose ‘View Filesystem’ from the view menu, and wait a moment. At the root of the filesystem, you’ll see a file named ‘MyTonesDB.db’. Delete this file, and disconnect the phone. Power it off, and power it on. Now you should see the mp3 file you added available in the list of available ringtones.

And remember, don’t be obnoxious. :P