Major Problem with HTC Hero - Need Help

[kbmaj]

Hi, I just bought the HTC Hero on Sprint. I love the phone in every other way except one.

My company uses RingCentral for our telephone system and they send all the voicemails I recieve in my email as a WAV file attachment (Specifically, the file is encoded with MS-GSM 6.10 Codec). Unfortunately, these voicemail files do not play on the HTC Hero and I have been unable to find a solution. Though Sprint says that Wav files are supported, these Wav files dont work.

Its non the player, its is the OS which has limited codec support. Meanwhile, windows mobile phones, Blackberry, and iPhone all support this format without a problem.

Can anyone suggest a solution - any possible way I can play my voicemails on the HERO. Otherwise, I will have to give it back and go back to my windows mobile based device.

Is there any available audio player, or version 1.6 of android, or a way to load the right codec into the phone that could solve this issue? Anyone?

 

[Jacqueline]

I did a search and found someone had the same problem with the Palm Pre. Here's how they solved it. Perhaps it will work for you.
GSM 6.10 WAV File will not play - PreCentral Forums

I got it to work by changing our asterisk/trixbox voice system to encode as a wav. Although it was already creating a wav file the encoding used was actually wav49. Once I made this change it works perfectly. The email attachments are a little larger, but at least I can hear them now.

 

[kbmaj]

Hi, thanks for the reply. As you can imagine, I already tried to do a search on the net and saw that thread already. Unfortunately, that solution is not an option in this case. The thread describes going to the source of the emails/attachments and changing the file format at that end - that would not work because I don't have the power to select a different incoming format for the attachment.

Any one have any other ideas?

 

[Jacqueline]

I looked through the official supported codecs and as you know, it is not there. You can put in a request here for someone to develop the codec for you.

I do think it's worth a shot putting in a request at work for them to change the format on the back-end so it is compatible with Android and Web OS. Larger file sizes are not as big a deal as they used to be, and they may be willing to make the change in order to support the new devices. If the people running the system do not have Web OS or Android, they may not even be aware there's a problem.

Another option could be to use Google Voice and take the incompatible system out of the picture. I don't have an Android phone yet to get the full phone integration, but I changed my official phone number to my Google Voice number and now not only can I play the voice mail in my browser, but I get the text transcription of the message.

 

[nathanmerlin]

Yep, I just tried it and it works great on my Sprint HTC Hero. Go to www.iphoneconvert.com and setup an account. You can forward your email to a unique address just for you. Then, they convert it to an MP4 and send it to any address you'd like. It plays on the default music player with the same quality as my wav files from RingCentral.

Apparently earlier iPhone's had the same problem with wav files. But Apple fixed it in an OS update. Android hasn't figured this one out yet. But there is a work-around.

 

[Jacqueline]

Gotta love it! Thanks so much for sharing this.

 

[map0824]

The upgrade to 2.2 does not fix the problem with not being able to play .wav files attached to e-mails.

 

[DonB]

You posted in a thread that is almost a year old, lol

The upgrade to 2.2 does not fix the problem with not being able to play .wav files attached to e-mails.