Thursday, July 28, 2011

How to set a different ringtone for email or SMS notifications

Android is full of little tricks.  The latest one involved email notifications.

I recently set up a new email account for server error messages, and wanted a "special" ring tone associated with that email account.  It's important that I know right away if my servers have problems, whereas I really couldn't care less about knowing precisely when email arrives to my other accounts.

Naturally, I couldn't find a decent notification message in the pre-installed list on my X10i.

So I downloaded a new ringtone, learning via Google that you had to put it into a directory called "ringtones" - even the all-lowercase is mandatory - for the phone to see it.

Well, it didn't.  Or, to be more precise, it did see the new ringtone as a ringtone, but it still did not show up in the ring tone list for email

Lovely separation, that.  One wonders exactly how many ring tones a person might need to have before it would be confusing enough to be worthwhile maintaining separate category lists that distinguish between "phone call" ringtones and "email/SMS" ringtones.  After all, one wouldn't want to mix up your fifteen "SMS" sounds with your eighteen "phone call" sounds, would one?

Anyway, the trick is the directory name changes for the "notification" sounds associated with SMS, email and other events.  These mp3 files go into "audio/notifications", rather than "ringtones".  Putting them there will let them show up on the email notification sounds list.