Question Bluetooth mp3 ringtone issue, is it my phone or the earbuds?

[hxj64631]

Hello,

I've recently purchased a pair of Soundcore Liberty 4 NC earbuds to replace my old Earfun earbuds, everything worked fine until I started to receive calls. I use a piece of mp3 music on my phone as ringtone and it has worked fine for years but with the new earbuds at first I thought I wasn't getting ringtone at all but then I realized earbuds do play ringtone but at a barely audible volume. To be specific once a call comes in, ringtone plays normally in earbuds for about a second or so then volume drops to almost none. My phone is Galaxy S24U with the latest stock rom (Android 16 & One UI 8.0), I've also tested this on S9+, A35 5G, and a Motorola smartphone, all of which have the same results. Interesting thing is this issue only occurs when I use non-stock ringtones. I can pick any of the stock Samsung ringtones and they'd work with the earbuds just fine but any music files used as ringtone earbuds'd have volume problem when receiving calls.

I have gone back and forth with Soundcore support for over a week and I haven't gotten anywhere. Now Soundcore support started to ask me to contact Samsung despite I repeatedly telling them 1. this happens to more than just Samsung phone 2. old non-Soundcore earbuds worked fine. Unsurprisingly after contacting Samsung support with the issue I am being sent in circles back to Soundcore. Anyone have any idea what's going on here? Any help'd be greatly appreciated, thanks.

 

[VidJunky]

Welcome to Android Central forums.

Just a couple of questions before I offer any advice.

Have you tried other a different song? It could be that file.

When you say, everything worked fine until you started receiving calls, do you mean the volume level was OK, like you were listening to YouTube or whatever at a reasonable normal volume but the ringtone just came through at a lower level, or do you mean that after the call the volume seemed low and remained low, or something else?

Did you use this same file previously, with the other buds, and it was fine but now with these it's no good?

Did you make this ringtone or download it?

My first thought while reading your post was recording level. I'm not saying this is exactly your issue but this is what could be happening. Audio has a recorded volume that is different than the volume you play it at. For example a track can be recorded at a level where the device volume has to be 9 for it to sound good but if recorded at a higher level you might get that same sound level at a 5. These are just example numbers but this would be like watching TV comfortably and suddenly the commercial comes on and nearly drives you out of the room at the same TV volume. This is why I asked if you tried other songs or media. That would tell us if it was a hardware or software issue. If the volume for all songs used for notifications was low like this might point to hardware. If it is just this sound, this ringtone file, that would point to it being software in the form of this sound file.

So what can you do? Well first, please answer the questions, it might help us help you troubleshoot this better but in the meantime. There's software that can increase the recorded volume level of a file. Increase or decrease, but anyway, you can find online sites where you can drag and drop a file to get it converted. If you're the DIY type there's opensource software for this too.

If the default sounds all sound good I wonder if it could be storage location. I can't think of how this would be unless it sees sounds from that location as media instead of a ringtone and plays it at a media volume level vs the notification sound level. A test you could try would be to max all of your volume levels and see if you get the same result. On the S24U we have 5 standard volumes, and if you're using BT ear buds 6, so if you max media or one of the others and it works, you could use Bixby or Google routines to increase that volume when you're connected to those ear buds like a set it and forget it thing.

Let us know what you find for more advice.