1. ANY file named .mp3 will be stripped. You must rename it .mid (or something else) for it to go through.
2. You may have to send it to an MMS specific address rather than the usual SMS. For example, I had to send mine to #@mms.att.net, as opposed to #@txt.att.net. It’s up to you to find out what your is. Remember, Google is your best friend.
3. The file size must be very small – I forget what the limit is, either 1MB or 500KB.
4. Not positive on this one, but I believe my phone would only play mono files, not stereo. Most audio encoding software should have this option when you’re encoding audio. I’m a Linux geek, so I just use LAME from the command line with the -a option to make it mono.
5. Again, not sure on this one, but if I recall correctly, my phone wouldn’t play files over a certain Kbps. I believe 32Kbps worked fine, don’t know about anything higher than that.

So, using all the above information, you should be able to play MP3s on your phone. I don’t use my TracFone any longer as I’ve gotten a ‘real’ phone with T-Mobile and therefore cannot test this any more to tell you exactly what to do.

One last thing: If I recall correctly (again, I can’t test this anymore, sorry), I was unable to play MP3s once I saved them; I could listen to them just fine when I open up the MMS message, but if I saved it it would not play, so I had to mark my messages with my MP3s to not be deleted and listen to them from there. It’s a pain in the neck, I know, but it is possible.

Just as a side note… If you use Linux, or have Cygwin installed, you’d use this command to create a phone compatible version of your MP3:

lame filename.mp3 -b 32 -a

-b sets the bitrate to 32Kbps, and -a makes the output a mono file. This info probably won’t be useful for very many people, but I thought I’d share it anyway.

It took me many hours over the course of several months to figure out all the tweaks that had to be made, so I hope this helps someone.

Having written this, I’m getting the urge to write a more detailed how-to and post it online. If I ever get around to it, I’ll post a link to it (hopefully that’s allowed here). Anyway, good luck to all!

Regardless, you probably don’t need to call Apple support unless you are still having a problem. If you have similar issues in the future, try the various troubleshooting steps before calling support. Then if you are not able to address it then I definitely recommend calling support. A couple of words of advice…

If it happens again, ask your son what he was doing when it crashed. Try removing that app from the iTouch…you can almost always figure out the source of problems like this so don’t worry too much. You should feel good about your gift to your son…I use my iTouch daily and while they are certainly expensive, I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth.

Good luck!