Solving Treo 650 MP3 Playback Problems

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.