It sucks, but the only way you can add ringtones to this phone is to send them as a PIX text message to the phone. To do this you have to send them to (your phone number)@vzwpix.com, i.e.
[email protected] (
Note: For some reason it only works for me when I reply to a Pix message that I've sent from my phone to my email on my computer, it doesn't work for me personally when I just create the email from scratch). You MUST make sure the MP3 file is under 340K (technically 350K but I've had a lot of files fail at around 345K). When you receive the PIX message and click on it, it will start playing the file. Once it does, you click on "options" and select "save as ringtone". Voila, you have a mp3 quality midi ringtone. If you do NOT make sure the file is under 340K or so, it will automatically compress the file to a different format and the audio quality will fall through the floor. The file should sound pretty much the way it sounded on your computer, if it doesn't then select the ringtone and click the "info" button under "options" and it will give you the file details. It should be a Midi file and should be the same size as the original. If it isn't, then the file was too big and was recompressed to a different format which it will specify when you click on "info", and the file size is typically 64K.
What sucks is that you have to pay the cost to send a text message every time you upload a new ringtone to your phone, so if you don't have a text messaging plan this can be somewhat costly if you load a bunch of ringtones on the phone. In my case, I never found any posts saying the file had to be under 350K, so I created a ton of ringtones around 30 seconds long, and beat my head against the wall trying to figure out why some of them sounded like crap after I sent them to the phone. This cost me a lot of $$ and a LOT of time while I created, sent, and tested ringtones, until I found out they had to be under 350K, and actually under 340K to be sure it wouldn't get recompressed.
This same process works for sending PIX to the 8300 that you can save and associate with your contacts so they appear when you send or receive a call from that person. You just save the file as a PIX rather than a ringtone.
By the way, if you haven't already, you need to enable MP3 files to playback on your VX8300 since it doesn't support them by default and doesn't tell you have to activate them in your manual. Simply click MENU0#000000, which will take you to a hidden menu. Scroll down and select number 11 "Music Setting" then enable MP3s. To make it so you can activate and control the MP3s from the buttons on the front of the phone (AFTER you've enabled MP3s), go to the "SETTINGS & TOOLS" menu - select #5 "Phone Settings" - select #2 "Shortcut Key" - select #5 "Play Key" - and finally select "My MP3s". You can now launch and control your MP3s from the buttons on the front, and you will see the graphic equalizer on the front and inside display panels of the phone. You can also select an equalizer preset while a file is playing by clicking on the side button below the volume controls buttons.
Cheers