Help BAD bug found involving ringtones/wallpapers & external sdcard

[MetroPOS]

On my phone (pretty sure this happens on all Esteems), I created a media/audio/ringtones folder (or just a /Ringtones folder) on my EXTERNAL sd card and then placed my sound files in there to use them as ringtones. Then I went to Settings-->Phone ringtone and set one of those sound files in there as my default ringtone. So everything is good up to this point, the ringtone I selected works fine and remains as my ringtone.

However, if I reboot the phone, or if I connect the phone to a computer and put it into mass storage mode to access the SD card for transfering files between my phone and the computer, once I disconnect and the Esteem performs a media scan, the phone automatically sets the ringtone back to one of the system default ringtones instead of keeping it on the custom ringtone I placed on the external SD card.

For people who have trouble understanding/reading all of that, what I'm basically saying here is if you tell the Esteem to use ringtones/wallpapers that you have on your EXTERNAL card...the next time the phone does a media scan (which occurs whenever you reboot the phone or connect it to a computer to access files from it), the phone will erase your settings and change the wallpaper/ringtones back to system default ones.

The only work around I found for this is to place any custom ringtones/wallpapers you want use on the phone's INTERNAL sd card instead of your external card.

Pretty dissappointing bug they have here..which shows you how much quality control testing they performed before releasing this phone.

 

[nuked]

This seems it will definitely be an issue will alot of people. I havent added an external SD card as of yet but I am planning to soon.

So I checked google and found an app that may work, but not with our Esteem or media scanner yet. A reviewer says it wont work with media scanner 2.3.3 and we have 2.3.4 Maybe the dev will update his app soon...

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.addz.mediascannerroot&feature=search_result

Also you could try freezing the app with Titanium Backup Pro if you have it and maybe it wont be able to do this scanning.....just a thought

EDIT - ok I found out that freezing media scanner or using the media scanner root thingy may not be a good idea, then there would be no way for new images or sounds to show up until you reboot...so no good :/

 

[MetroPOS]

Yeah I know that apps exist that can disable the media scanner, but your phone has to be rooted. Have not had owned phone long enough to want to root it yet.

 

[nuked]

Still looking into this, there has to be a way to make it work...

Pretty dissappointing bug they have here..which shows you how much quality control testing they performed before releasing this phone.

It seems it may not just be an Esteem problem, I have seen several other phone manufacturers with the same problem, for example here is one with the Atrix...
http://www.atrixforums.com/forum/motorola-atrix-help/698-add-ringtone-phone-storage.html

Still researching....I pulled my 2gb card from my Ascend so i will check back later with some results....

 

[nuked]

Hrmm, ok I just did a test by placing two WAV files and one MP3 into /sdcard/Ringtones/ then changed my Ringtone to one of the WAv files, and rebooted, wife happened to call and of course it worked just fine since it was on internal SD storage.


I moved all of these from /sdcard/Ringtones/ to /_ExternalSD/Ringtones/ and then changed my ringtone to the other WAV file, and rebooted.

I did not get a call so I am not 100% sure it worked BUT when you go to change the volume under sound settings, NORMALLY when you move the ringtone slider bar, it plays your current ringtone, and it DID play my new ringtone stored on the external SD card. Note: moving the slider on media also plays your current ringtone and the slider for alarms plays your current alarm sound.

I then connected to USB and selected to mount as storage, opened up both internal and external SD cards and then disconnected safely from Windows 7 and media scanner went to scanning. I checked again and the ringtone was still playing under the volume settings. I rebooted again and still had my new ringtone playing under volume control. I then changed to the MP3 and did the exact same test with the exact same results.

I will test with actual phone calls to make 100% sure but I think it seems to be working fine on my end. I will also test with alarms and notifications and backgrounds later today.

EDIT - ok phone calls work and tested with alarms as well. So copying either an MP3 or WAV to /sdcard/_ExternalSD/Ringtones/ allowed me to change my ringtone to one stored on external SD card, even through a reboot and after a USB storage connect to my laptop. The same goes for /sdcard/_ExternalSD/alarms/ (has to be lowercase though)