This is a pretty lame hack but nonetheless – it will benefit those of you without Bluetooth enabled computers, or those who haven’t bought a Bluetooth dongle. The Motorola SLIVR comes with a USB cable to transfer MP3′s from your computer to iTunes. When the SLIVR attaches to your computer (I’m running OS X, 10.4.3), it shows up quickly as a mass storage device and then disappears; I’m not sure if this is DRM or the Motorola folks just trying to make the device as “simple” as possible to use. Essentially, what happens is the SLIVR is mounted as a mass storage device, and almost as soon as it is mounted, it issues an unmount and removes itself from your computer.
For those of us without Bluetooth file transfer, this is annoying, especially if you want to transfer ringtones, backgrounds or pictures. The good news is that you can easily circumvent the auto-unmounting of the mass file storage system. When you plug your SLIVR in to your Mac, it will show up in /Volumes for a few second – less than ten but certainly enough time to issue some commands. Here’s how to prevent the SLIVR from automatically unmounting from your system.
- Open a terminal on your Mac (terminal.app or iTerm works fine)
- cd /Volumes
- Plug your SLIVR in to the USB port. After a second or two, your SLIVR will show up in /Volumes as whatever you named it (My Slivr or whatever)
- In your terminal quickly cd into your SLIVR (cd MY_SLIVR)
- You’re golden. Since you’ve moved into that filesystem, the operating system will no longer automatically unmount it.
- MY_SLIVR will show up mounted on your computer.
You can now transfer whatever you want onto the SLIVR. They will go onto the flash card storage device, which you can access on the phone by switching storage devices.
You probably want to know how to move over MP3 ringtones, so here’s the hack. Basically, you move MP3′s into the audio directory (/Volumes/MY_SLIVR/audio), unmount the phone, copy the MP3′s from the flash card to the phone, and then assign them as ringtones. The ring length of a SLIVR seems to be something along the lines of 21-23 seconds, so crop your MP3′s accordingly (I use Audacity for this reason).
When you want to unmount the SLIVR, simply cd out of /Volumes/MY_SLIVR (or close the terminal), and unmount it like any other storage device.
Tags: mobile
I wonder how the computer determines that it should unmount the phone? Does OS X specifically know about that type of device? Maybe there is a special .unmount file or something that OSs can optionally obey?
go into itunes and enable phone for use as storage device (for windows pc) phone wont unhook (go invis) from pc then.
Maybee I am extremely computer illiterate… But my SLIVR only loads on itunes. I don’t see it mounted anywhere. A little help please? Thanks in advance.