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.

 

[hxj64631]

Yes I've tried several different songs, even same songs in different format. What I meant by "everything worked fine until I started to receive calls" I meant using BT earbuds to listen to music, podcast, YouTube, getting notification sounds, making outgoing calls, etc., things you'd do that involves BT earbuds playing audio from connected phone. In order to test I have every volume on the phone (ringtone, media, notifications, etc.) as well as volume on earbuds itself (set by button on earbuds) set to maximum but it makes no difference, when a call comes in ringtone is still barely audible from BT earbuds.

The file I first used has been my ringtone for years without issue, it played fine with phone speaker as ringtone or by music player and it played fine on my old BT earbuds as ringtone or by music player. The same file plays fine with the new earbuds by music player and it even plays fine when you preview ringtone under Settings --> Sounds and vibration --> Ringtone, I can select the file and phone plays preview through BT earbuds without problem but once again, it's a different story when it plays as ringtone when a call actually comes in, and when I said call I meant both regular phone call or VOIP call such as Google Voice.

The ringtone is just some mp3 music from YouTube video. I find it highly unlikely to be related to recorded volume because wouldn't that reflect on any and all playback of the file not just limited to being played as ringtone when a call comes in through BT earbuds? The mp3 I tried were also from different sources, some were from YouTube videos and some were from CD rips I did years ago when CD was still a thing... Just to be sure I even converted some mp3 into different formats just to see if it'd make any difference, it didn't.

Amazon sent me a replacement and it has the exact same issue and I've tested this on 3 different Samsung phones plus 1 Motorola phone, not quite sure where to go from here or if it's even worth the time to dig any further. The only thing I can think of is maybe it's related to Android support of in-band ringtone that was added years ago but that's also seems pretty unlikely...

 

[VidJunky]

I went and looking for reviews and found a few here and there but Amazon wanted me to log in to see reviews, I'm in public so, NO. Anyway, the few reviews I found, only looking at bad reviews, were complaints about fit. One reviewer even said they sound great but hurt their ears. If this was an actual issue I would think there would be other complaints about this. It sounds like something that would be noticeable and people are more likely to complain about something than to paise it, IMO.

You might push to get another pair just to see if maybe you got two bad ones. Or they sent you the same pair twice. My first thought. Companies are shady. But testing on other devices shows that it isn't a setting on your phone, it wouldn't be the phone if it is happening on other phones too. I don't see how it would know, or be able to have a different behavior but really you've proven that is the only answer. Is there any way to factory reset them??? I can't imagine.

Wish there was more that I could help with.

Good luck.