Help Custom ringtone not playing

[cookiemonster79]

I set custom ringtones (using short mp3s) for two of my contacts, however on multiple occasions the ringtone did not work. For example, today one of my contacts called... I saw the call come up on the screen but no ringtone at all. When I tried to go to the screen to select ringtones, the custom one showed up on the list but when I selected it nothing played.

The ringtone has worked before, so it does not seem to be a consistent always/never type of thing. Has anyone else experienced this?

This was on a stock Motorola Droid, no root or anything else.

Seems like some strange issue with playing media, I downloaded a .mp4 video and it would not play - after powering off then on, it worked fine.

 

[johnlgalt]

Are you by chance using some sort of task killer application to automatically close tasks?

 

[cookiemonster79]

Are you by chance using some sort of task killer application to automatically close tasks?

Nope, plus I would imagine the ringtone capability is part of the "core" system and not an application that could be killed.

 

[johnlgalt]

I would too, but I have seen some very strange things happen when tasks are killed. Some of the apps can kill more than just applications, such as services, and before I learned better I found out the hard way that a certain service I had running was integral to something that I actually wanted running all the time.

However, since you're not rooted, I'm inclined to agree with your analysis - nothing that you could be doing in that light is causing it.

Do you use the phone with headphones / line out cable a lot?

Any time the ringtone does not play has the SDCard been available? Have you had any issue with anything else not play? Does media work when the ringtone won't (right then)?

 

[cookiemonster79]

First to answer your questions -- I rarely (almost never) use headphones/line out. The times the ringtone didn't play, the phone was not connected to any USB device and I never remove the memory card.

I don't think it matters, but I do have "TaskPanel" installed only to manually kill applications -- it is not setup for any automatic task killing.

So I did some testing, and came up with something interesting related to the ringtone issue and playing back local videos.

Scenario 1:

When I try to play a local video file, I get an error that says:

Cannot play video - Sorry, this video cannot be played.

Also, I noticed the following behavior:

Contacts > Select contact > Menu > Options > Ringtone

If I select any built-in ringtone it plays, however if I select the mp3 based ringtone it does not play.

Scenario 2:

I am able to play video files with no problem, and doing the steps above related to a mp3 ringtone actually plays the mp3 ringtone.

---

I am making an assumption that whatever prevented the ringtone from playing when someone called is the same thing keeping it from playing in the ringtone settings window, and the same thing keeping the video from playing.

Unfortunately I have no clue what is triggering this. If I kill a few apps (not any specific ones just randomly killing a few) seems to resolve it, so I am wondering if I just have too many things running. I have almost 150 apps installed, maybe I just have too much loaded. TaskPanel usually has my available memory just under 40MB, but I know with almost nothing running it is closer to 100MB.

 

[Shadowtech]

I think it is just something with android. I have custom tones set for most of my contacts, but I notice a lot of the time when someone calls, it just plays the default. When this happens I also notice the caller id just shows the phone number and not my actual contact info.

So apparently the OS sometimes isn't converting the information fast enough to select the proper ringtone. My caller ID does fix itself during the ringing, but the tone doesn't. This generally happens when my phone is in standby, so maybe it's the cpu ramping issue, but I have my min set to 250. Maybe I should try higher.

Or it could be something with the reading of the SD card not being quick enough also. I never thought of pushing a ringtone into the system files to see if that worked better. But I do believe the callerid not kicking in fast enough is the biggest issue.

 

[unobtrusivetones]

I think it is just something with android. I have custom tones set for most of my contacts, but I notice a lot of the time when someone calls, it just plays the default. When this happens I also notice the caller id just shows the phone number and not my actual contact info.

So apparently the OS sometimes isn't converting the information fast enough to select the proper ringtone. My caller ID does fix itself during the ringing, but the tone doesn't. This generally happens when my phone is in standby, so maybe it's the cpu ramping issue, but I have my min set to 250. Maybe I should try higher.

Or it could be something with the reading of the SD card not being quick enough also. I never thought of pushing a ringtone into the system files to see if that worked better. But I do believe the callerid not kicking in fast enough is the biggest issue.

This happens to me too quite often too. I usually reboot my phone after it does it a few times and it seems to go away for a while.
Does it usually correct itself over time for you or do you reboot your phone too?

 

[semidone2]

This happens to me too quite often too. I usually reboot my phone after it does it a few times and it seems to go away for a while.
Does it usually correct itself over time for you or do you reboot your phone too?

Having the same issue. Been searching a lot online for solutions, others seem to be having issue as well.

No one has a good solution...

 

[moriwakis]

This happens to me too quite often too. I usually reboot my phone after it does it a few times and it seems to go away for a while.
Does it usually correct itself over time for you or do you reboot your phone too?

I've had this problem before but I thought that it'd go away once I was on Froyo. No luck. Are there still no solutions?

 

[mhenry]

Brand new droid user (Samusung Galalxy) - I downloaded ringtones fromt the droid marketplace and I can play them in the application fine but when I set them as the ringtone they don't play. Any new ideas on this thread? Thanks all!