New phone. Sanyo 8100 / Sprint. It has a camera. The camera pretty much sucks.

Do any of you know if there's some way to get my own MP3s into this thing to use as ringers? I'm aghast (but unsurprised) that they want to charge $1.50 per 90 days to use a custom ringer! Actually, I'm surprised they don't just go ahead and charge you a buck every time your phone rings.

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Update: For those of you following along at home, I finally learned how to reliably get WAVs into this phone as ringers. You'd think you could just email a WAV to the phone, but no, that would be too simple. <LJ-CUT text="The trick goes like this..."> The trick goes like this:

• Downcode the .wav file to dixie-cups-and-string quality:
  sox orig.wav -ws -r 8000 -c 1 ringer.wav

  (Maybe use -v 3.5 to crank up the volume: flavor to taste.) The end result should be "RIFF (little-endian) WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 8000 Hz".

• Get "PureVoice Converter for Windows" (from here) and run it under WINE to make a .qcp from the .wav:

  wine PureVoice/PVConv ringer.wav ringer.qcp

  Why this extra undocumented wrapper format? Who knows. It's a phone company, they do things like that.

• Create a file called ringer.gcd that contains this text:

  Content-Type: audio/vnd.qcelp
  Content-Name: My Ringer
  Content-Version: 1.0
  Content-Vendor: monkeybutter
  Content-URL: http://your_site/.../ringer.qcp
  Content-Size: the size of the qcp file in bytes

  (Note MIME-like (yet gratuitously not-actually-MIME) choice of headers. It's the little things.)

• Configure your web server to send the right content type for these file extensions, by adding this to .htaccess:

  AddType audio/vnd.qcelp qcp
  AddType text/x-pcs-gcd gcd

• Now you need to get your phone to load the URL of the .gcd file. After reading that, your phone will download and install the .qcp file. Why they do it in two steps like this, I have no idea.

  One way to do this is to just go into your phone's web browser and type in the URL of the .gcd file. It should only take you about ten minutes to type that in on the phone's keypad. Another way is to send an email (sorry, "text message") to your phone that has that URL in it, and click on it when you receive it. Shockingly, it can be just a plain old text message:

  echo http://.../ringer.gcd | \
    Mail 4155551212@messaging.sprintpcs.com

  If your phone gives you the error, "Data Error 905, Attribute Mismatched, Install failed", that means "the content-type that the web server returned for the .qcp file was text/plain or something other than audio/vnd.qcelp." The AddType stuff above really does matter, to my phone at least. Presumably other phones are less picky.

There are a bunch of web sites out there that automate some of this for you, but I find that they mostly don't work reliably, or get the content-types wrong, or who knows what. It was much easier to just do it via my own domain.