Custom ring tones on Helio Heat
Those of you who have the nifty Helio Heat device will come to figure out there is no possible way to download ring tones from other websites. Helio only limits its users to get them from their website. Their song choice is alright but is not extensive at all. For myself, I wanted the radio mix that is heard on Portal and a few other songs I have that no one has probably heard of.
So, let’s get to it. Here is a list of things you will need to get this to work:
- Audacity. This is a neat audio editor that is free to use. Get it here.
- Media Convert. This website will be needed to convert our media files.
- A linux live CD. This can be any live cd that supports USB. If you have Ubuntu around you can use that. Get that working and move on. They have forums and stuff for getting live CD’s to work so don’t give up.
- Ring tone files. I have already downloaded a ring tone you can use so you don’t have to buy one. This one is by Muse.
First you need to find the music you want as a ring tone. Open Audacity and open the sound of your choice. Use Audacity to select about 30 seconds that you want as your ring tone.
Export as mp3. Use any name you want. It doesn’t matter because we’ll be changing it.
Next, go the Media-Convert and convert the song to a 3gp file. This shouldn’t take that long. Once you’re done, copy the 3gp file along with the zip I gave you onto a flash drive.
Now you need to boot up the live CD. Just restart your comp and boot from the CD. Use Google to help you out if you get stuck. Once it’s ready, set your Heat in USB disk mode and plug it in. This is under the “User Memory” option in the “Plan” menu. This will mount two disks in Linux. The first is the standard mass storage that you would normally see in Windows. The second is part of the file system. This is what we need.
Browse to media>vod>lb. We’ll use the lb folder and the inf folder which is inside the lb folder. If you have downloaded any ringtones you will see them here.
Open your flash drive and copy the files to the desktop. Inside the zip file there is an inf file. Copy the inf into the inf folder. Get the 3gp song you made and copy it into the lb folder. Now rename the 3gp file to the same exact number of the inf file. Then change the extension to skm. Here is a graphic to show you what I mean. Don’t worry, this is the last part.
After you get the files in correctly and matching numbers (they can be any numbers as long as they match), just disconnect through your phone’s menu. Go to rings and find your song. The name will be different but the sound will be your song. Do this to as many songs as you want. Just make sure you use different numbers for every song. Good luck!
Extra:
Inside the zip file is also a skm file which is the Muse ringtone. You can copy this over to the phone in the lb directory along with the inf in the inf folder for that ringtone.
Make sure not to delete/move/rename anything inside the system folders. This may damage the phone. I don’t know myself, but I advise you don’t. If you browse around you can also find your photos taken with your phone and copy them to your flash drive.