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Ontario Technoblog

Ontario Emperor technology blog.

This blog has been superseded by the mrontemp blog
Name:
Location: Ontario, California, United States

Sometime audio artist. Email comments on this blog to the gmail account mrontemp.

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Smartphone Sound (Motorola Q, Windows Media Player)

I seem to be running into the PDA problem of the month every once in a while. Fortunately, this one had a happy ending - at least for me.

I got a Motorola Q phone a few weeks ago, and have in the whole been very happy with it. It syncs to my work email fairly well, plus it has the Bubble Breaker game - what more could you ask for?

Over the last few weeks, I've downloaded a small bit of music ("Non Sequitur 15" plus a few MIDIs) to my Q phone for my occasional enjoyment. I also used the Q features to record a video, with sound, for my additional enjoyment. (I have to write about the Q's video recording features, and compatibility issues, later.)

Well, today I wanted to listen to the sound from my MIDIs and my mp3, but no sound came out.

I tried playing the video that I made at work, but no sound came out from there, either.

Figuring that this might just be a Windows Media Player problem, I tried turning on the sound in Bubble Breaker. No sound there.

As a fourth test, I retested the alarm feature. Got sounds on the alarm, so it sounded more and more like some type of OS issue.

After a bunch of research, I finally found something that worked in the "Problem with Q Sound" thread at pdaphonehome.com. First, the original problem, as stated by Tizzle on July 23:


Problem with Q Sound

My Q was working perfecly up until the last few days. I can't for some reason get my Q to play any sounds (Player 10 or in the settings) except... when a call comes in, email all that works fine. But if i go to the settings and try to change the ring tone i can't preview the sounds it just will not play. NOW the funny part is if i hook up my bluetooth ear piece everything works just fine. I have searched and can't seam to find anything that could be doing this, Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?



There were a myriad of suggestions, ranging from checking your profile settings to performing a hard reset, but the solution that worked for me came from Noah82:


When you are on the home screen, hold down the jog dial button until you see "Earpiece Volume". Then, you should be able to move the jog dial up and you will have sound again


I did this, and now I can again hear "Non Sequitur 15" in all its glory. (Take that, Paul Vincent Avila.)

(By the way, I'm full throttle on del.icio.us now. Related tags include cellular+telephone and windows+media+player.)

Friday, November 03, 2006

Windows Vista REALLY delayed

The Register reports the following (credit Charlie Burgum for discovering this):

Microsoft's mythical operating system looks set to remain a thing of legend. The oft-delayed Windows Vista is facing an epic setback, having been pushed back 18,000 years.

According to Manchester-based IT supplier Aria.co.uk, don't expect to run Redmond's new beast on your PC until 30 January, 20007.

The site says:

"Don't hold out! Purchase Windows XP Professional edition after now and recieve a FREE* upgrade voucher for Microsoft's latest and long awaited Windows Vista Business Edition (release date January 30 20007)."


A screen shot from the aria.co.uk website, as well as speculation about the reasons for the multi-millennial delay, can be found here.