# Solving Treo 650 MP3 Playback Problems

Originally published on 14 April 2008 at
http://www.namesuppressed.com/syneryder/2008/treo-650-mp3-problem.shtml
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12:32pm, 14 April 2008

As much as I love my Palm Treo 650 smartphone, I recently had a
problem where the Treo wouldn't play MP3s through the speaker. It
could play MP3s using Pocket Tunes through headphones, but not through
the external speaker.

I've had occasional speaker playback problems before, and the usual
trick here is to plug in the headphones and pull them out again fairly
quickly. If something is in the headphone socket, or the Palm
mistakenly thought the headphones were still plugged in, that usually
fixes it. But that didn't work this time.

Even more bizarrely, my ringtones and system sounds *were* working
through the speaker! So I knew the speaker was working, and that my
Treo 650 knew the headphones weren't plugged in.

Luckily, I discovered something that did work - going into the Prefs
application on the Palm, and choosing Buttons from the Personal menu.
At the bottom of that list, you can choose which application is run if
you "Press + Hold Side button". While I was having the MP3 problems,
my side button was set to run RealPlayer, even though I use Pocket
Tunes. I tried changing the setting, then changing it back to
RealPlayer, and that worked for me. I later discovered that just
pressing the side button on the Palm also fixed the MP3 problem for
me.

So: if your Palm Treo 650 won't play MP3s from the speaker, try
pressing the side button on the Treo 650! Even if you never use the
Treo's side button, that might be all you need to do to make it work
again.

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   (C) 2008 Kohan Ikin  /  http://www.namesuppressed.com/syneryder/
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