Sunday, September 30, 2007
Hacking the cel phone
Well it's not really hacking, but I suppose it could be called a hack (The word hack has undergone a fairly major change in meaning in the past few years. A hacker used to mean someone who really knew what they were doing ala The Cuckoo's Egg but is much more mundane now, similar to what I'm describing here. Similar I suppose to the change in the meaning of the word geek. )
Anyways, this is about the MP3 player on my cellphone(Motorola V360) which is java application(or midlet) that works quite well, except for one thing. It wasn't showing some of the albums.
The phone appears as a flash drive when it's plugged into your computer and you drag and drop your songs and albums to it. When you start the Digital Audio Player it takes forever as it rebuilds the song directly, only it doesn't always do it right.
I noticed a few albums missing from the master play list in the Digtial Audio Player (called mp3player.mdb at the root level of the phone/flash drive, and no, it is not an MS-Access database file!).
Looking at the file, I could discern that the structure was not complete for all entries, and it was these entries that were missing from the interface to the player. So a little judicious editing of the file, making the missing entries look like the other entries (I won't get into the details here, that would be too geeky and I'm still sticking with the notion that this will not be geeky blog) and I can now see and play the previous missing items. Cool.
Anyways, this is about the MP3 player on my cellphone(Motorola V360) which is java application(or midlet) that works quite well, except for one thing. It wasn't showing some of the albums.
The phone appears as a flash drive when it's plugged into your computer and you drag and drop your songs and albums to it. When you start the Digital Audio Player it takes forever as it rebuilds the song directly, only it doesn't always do it right.
I noticed a few albums missing from the master play list in the Digtial Audio Player (called mp3player.mdb at the root level of the phone/flash drive, and no, it is not an MS-Access database file!).
Looking at the file, I could discern that the structure was not complete for all entries, and it was these entries that were missing from the interface to the player. So a little judicious editing of the file, making the missing entries look like the other entries (I won't get into the details here, that would be too geeky and I'm still sticking with the notion that this will not be geeky blog) and I can now see and play the previous missing items. Cool.
// posted by Bob Walker @ 9:00 PM 
