Getting the Motorola V3M to sync with Windows Media Player

Source: http://motov3m.com/tiki-index.php?page=UsingBasics

This is a guide to setting up your phone to sync with Windows Media Player.

The Motorola V3m serves not only as a phone, but also as a multimedia device. One of its primary uses is as a music player. It is a fairly robust music player, allowing for music syncing with the device through Windows Media Player 10. Out of the box, the device works only with the Windows WMA format, so WMP 10 is required to ensure that songs that are synced to the device are in the proper format.

It should be noted that the only thing required to sync Windows Media Player with your computer is a USB to mini-USB cable, with this being an example. (NOTE: You need a mini-USB 5-pin cable.)

You will also want to purchase a microSD (transflash) card for your phone, if you want to have more than the approx. 30MB of storage space built into the phone ( = approx 10 song capacity). Transflash cards range from 128MB (approx $20), to the newly released 2GB capacity; the 2GB card does not appear to be compatible with the V3m (the entire 2GB will not be available for use).

A 1GB transflash card can be purchased, with USB adapter, from the link on the right of this website. The USB adapter is handy if you don't have an SD card reader for your computer (the transflash fits into an SD adapter for copying files - however this requires an SD card reader on your computer; the USB adapter requires only a USB port for use with the card).

Verizon sells a music essentials kit for the phone for $30, which includes drivers for the music sync, a mini-usb to usb cable, and a pair of earphones that have a mic attached so you can answer the phone while listening. However, it appears that many have had trouble getting this kit to work out of the box, possibly due to out-dated drivers on the CD.

The following is a step-by-step process on how to get Windows Media Player 10 configured for use with the V3m. It requires only a V3m phone, a mini-usb to usb cable, and Windows Media Player 10.

Steps to Configure Windows Media Player 10 Sync with V3m:
1) Download and install this program: http://www.bvrp.com/Customers/Motorola/DriverTool.zip
This program will uninstall any old Motorola drivers, and install the appropriate drivers for your phone to connect to Windows Media Player.
2) Turn your phone off and plug it into the computer
3)Wait for the phone to be recognized as a modem by your computer - a box should pop up informing you that "Motorola USB modem" has been attached
4) Turn your phone on
5)In your phone, go to Menu....Get It Now Menu....Get Tunes and Tones...Sync Music
6) Windows should recognize your phone as an MTP device, and ask you if you want to open Windows Media Player
7) You should now be able to sync files in Windows Media Player, just like with a regular device

Troubleshooting:
In certain circumstances, it has been reported that WMP10 will not sync with the V3m, despite the above instructions. I have had this happen to me when I installed WMP11, then uninstalled and reinstalled WMP10. For the life of me, I couldn't get the computer to sync with the phone after that. If you run into problems syncing, try this patch. It is the only thing I have found so far that restored functionality.

File Conversion Issues:
If you are trying to copy MP3 files, it appears that the WM10 file conversion tool does not work properly. Files are converted and copied to the phone, but produce no sound when played.

If you encounter this issue try using a different audio program (such as Adobe Audition) to encode the files to WMA format before copying them. This process was tested and worked with Constant bit rate encoding, Windows Media Audio 9.1 - CBR 192 Kbps, 44 KHz, 16 bit, stereo. Other settings may work, but have not yet been tested.

You can still use WM10 to copy the files to your device. WM10 certainly copies files to your phone faster than BitPim or MPT.

Source: http://motov3m.com/tiki-index.php?page=UsingBasics

Web Page Scraping

One of the ways we've been gathering data for years has been called "screen scraping." You log onto a program, find certain text in certain portions of the page, and "scrape" it off for your own application's needs.

This has become a whole new animal with the explosion of the Internet. So much more information is available now, but it's constantly changing as well! We are able to use RSS, blogs, XML, Web Services and other types of feeds to obtain much of the information you may need on your site, but every once in a while we still have to get out there and scrape certain information right off of a page.

We can provide this functionality on your website, or can provide you with the development tools to do it yourself! Contact us for more information or click here for a live demonstration.

Data-Driven META Tags

We have recently developed an ASP.NET control that allows for database driven META tags and page titles for pages on your website. This control, when placed on a page, will look up META data and page TITLE information from the database and incorporate into the page. This is extremely useful on sites that use master pages and completely data-driven virtual pages, such as this very page, or any other in our 'Content' directory on this site.

We invite you to check out this tool in action by looking at the bottom of the Contact Us page on this site, or any other of the pages where we have added custom META Keywords or Page Titles. This control automatically removes existing titles and tags if it finds conflicts, and will help you make your data-driven site much more search engine friendly.

For more information on this project, click here.

Website Uploads

If your business is a service provider to other businesses or even individuals, you may often need for them to send you large computer files for you to work on for them, such as accounting software backups or logo designs. Often these files are too large to send via email, so another method must be used. We have developed a simple "web site upload" application that will allow your clients to upload files of any given size to your website. The files can be marked as public or private, and can then be accessed via a password from your place of business.

Additional features of this application include an automatic email notification feature that will send you an email whenever someone uploads a file to your system. We can also add additional levels of privacy protection so that each of your clients has their own private "store" of information and they, and only they, can access those files.

We can add this feature to any website we develop for you, or can even add it to many existing websites you may already have. All of the source code is also available for purchase. Contact us with any questions you may have about this product.

You can view a working example of this application here

Data-Driven School Corporation Websites

We've been doing some work with some local high schools and entire school corporations and are beginning to see a need for consistency and data-driven templates to better allow these organizations to effectively communicate and connect with the visitors to their sites.

You can read more about this project here.

Daily Bible Reading Companion

We've recently built a smashup (I think that's the technical term) that combines several types of information feed into a single page. The application reads a database to find a Bible reading for a given day of the year from a SQL Server database hosted on the site, and then queries an external web site via a URL and Querystring for that passage. Depending on copyright rules, the text is displayed in-line or in an IFRAME html element. The page contains links to other days readings, making it ideal for search engine placement, as well as the RSS feed that is made available via the URL bar or an RSS link. The page also contains other RSS feeds from the Daily Audio Bible Forums site, which is a messaging board for people going through this reading plan together.

You can view the application here. We'd be happy to create a reading plan or other similar type of smashup application for your site. Get your creative juices flowing and give us a call!