Greetings MyxerToneheads! I am the “Biz Dev Guy” here and recently joined the company as employee number 13 (and yes, I consider that LUCKY!). I look forward to posting here periodically and giving you a little “Touch of Sass!” For the uninitiated, us corporate dudes use “Business Development” as a fancy way of saying “make partnerships” so my mission is to be the Johnny Appleseed of Myxerland and spread Myxer seeds all over the Internet so that Music and Content sites everywhere will use our Myxer Platform to enable their stuff to reach your mobile phone. With that in mind, if you have content sites you like and you want to see them “get Mobilized” so you can get their content on your phone, let us know who they are, and Johnny Myxerseed will give them a holler… and you will know that you have contributed to a Mobile cause!

– Jeff Sass

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Seems ringtone behavior has changed on a lot of the Verizon phones. We are getting more and more recent feedback about lots of Verizon phones being affected. We’ve heard feedback about ringtones no longer sounding as good as they used to, getting error messages when trying to download ringtones, no ringtone attachment with the ringtone message and ringtones can only be saved as a sound. We’re still trying to figure out exactly which phones have been affected and what, if any, workarounds are available.

6/12/07 UPDATE

We’ve got ringtones working (and sounding good) on more phones with the latest updates we’ve just made to the site.  Be sure you’ve set your phone details correctly and don’t have any ringtone overrides set if your phone is listed as working below.  Here is what we’re currently seeing:

Audiovox CDM-8940 works

LG – seems like most are working again but we’ve specifically tested the following:
VX9900 (enV)
VX8500 (Chocolate)
VX8300
VX8000
VX7000
VX6000
VX5300

Motorola – mixed results
working – Razr (V3), E815, V710, Krzr (K1M), L7C
sort of working – V325 (doesn’t sound very good, but you can set it as a ringtone)

We just tried the Razr again and the ringtone is saved as a sound but you can still set it as a ringtone from ‘Get It Now’.

Nokia 6315I works

Samsung – mixed results
working – SCH-U series (SCH-U740, SCH-U620)
not working – SCH-A series (SCH-A870, SCH-A930)
SCH-A950 seems to work with AWB or MP3 format sometimes

We have received feedback that AMR or WAV works on the SCH-A series so you could try those formats. However, WAV files are very large which cause the ringtones to be fairly short (6 to 10 seconds).

We are seeing new developments every day so stay tuned, we’ll keep the blog updated.

Charlene

in news,verizon wireless with 208 Comments

Well, it seems like Verizon has changed something recently which is causing some of the ringtones we are sending to be delivered as QCP files (which typically don’t sound as good).

[UPDATE 4/21: We think we've worked around Verizon's changes and gotten things working again. If you have a Verizon phone, make sure you've specified your phone model on the phone details page so that we can twiddle the right bits to get ringtones to you correctly.]

This is happening on the Motorola V3 Razr, Motorola V325, and possibly some other phones. There also seems to be something weird happening with the Samsung A950. That phone just doesn’t seem to be working anymore. We’ve had some users tell us that they are getting errors when they receive the message on their phone and others say that there is no sound attached. Aarg!

Please let us know if you are are having any problems or if you have found a new ringtone format that works better for your Verizon phone.

In the meantime, we are trying everything we can think of on our end. We’ll let you know if we find anything. Stay tuned…

in news,verizon wireless with 130 Comments

Yes, KTLA’s Kurt the Cyberguy did a little segment on MyxerTones that aired this week around the country on CW stations. It’s pretty funny to see people talking about our stuff on what feels like (but isn’t!) the local news. You half expect the people to say things like, “Gosh, he was such a nice neighbor. I can’t believe he was capable of that” or something. But instead, we got a lot of free publicity, and it wasn’t like 60 minutes where they sucker you into an interview and then make you cry before it’s over.

Many thanks to MyxerIndie New MaximumDonkey for showing up on such short notice to film the segment with Kurt in LA. They just happen to be a featured artist on MyxerTones this week. Me, I flew in to do an in-studio interview. Yes, yes, 5 hours on a plane for 3 seconds of airtime. But what’s important is that I am semi-coherent in the three seconds they spent on me. They could’ve just as easily picked a part of the interview where I was, umm, like, uhhhhhh, stammering and all that. Having a big camera about two feet in front of your face makes you kinda nervous.

Anyway, fun stuff! You’ll be sure to notice the new shiny red “as seen on TV” buttons appearing all over the site any day now…

in news with 7 Comments

Now that the move is over, I feel safe in telling everying out there that – until this week – the company behind MyxerTones was operated out of a two bedroom suburban home in South Florida. Really. It’s not that we weren’t a serious operation – oh, if anything, we’re deadly serious people – it’s just that, well, it was a really comfortable house.

Of course, that only works for the first dozen or so employees, and it’s funny to tell reporters and business partners and recruits that you’re “the second house on the right” after turning off the main road. And let me tell you something: if you live in South Florida, you’ve got to be by the water. So we said, wouldn’t it be really sweet if we could actually work by the beach? So, we packed up the U-Haul:

…and moved into our new digs, complete with top floor view of the atlantic ocean and the Deerfield Beach fishing pier. Kick in some surfboards, and this is the kind of place where you can really be happy you’re at work:

I want to tell you a little more about how much fun we had at SxSW, but everybody’s pretty beat right now, what with the move and the festivities and everything else going on. So I’ll save that for another day. In the meantime, we’re delivering more ringtones every day than we did for like the first year we were in operation. So have a great time and make yourself some sweet tones. We’ll be surfing!

in news with 10 Comments