How to Add Ringtones, Alarms and Notification Sounds to Your Android Phone

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Hello newbies, here’s a brief guide that explains how to insert each ringtone, or a media file, as a ringtone to your Android phone:

Plug your phone’s memory card in any way to your computer (connect your phone with a USB cable, memory cards reader, etc. …), look for the folders:
Mnt/Sdcard/Media/Audio/Alarms
Mnt/Sdcard/Media/Audio/Notifications
Mnt/Sdcard/Media/Audio/Ringtones
* If there are no such folders you can create them yourself.
* On some devices you will see those folders as: /Media/Audio/Alarms – without Mnt/ or Sdcard/.

Now, to each folder, copy the media files you want as ringtones or as other sounds on you phone, in the following order:

Ringtones – put here anything you want to hear as a ringtone when you have incoming calls.
Notifications – put here anything you want to hear as a notification alert. you have a lot of options here: SMS, e-mails, calendar alerts, chat, notifications of apps like Facebook, Twitter, etc. …
Alarms – put here anything you want to hear as the sound of your alarm clock.

* If you are looking for the default Android ringtones and other sound, you can download them here.

Now reboot your device and that’s it.
You can now choose the ringtones you added in the sound menu inside the main settings menu, or through various apps settings (email, SMS, alarm clock app, etc …).

16 replies to this post

  3. I am trying to get an audio notification when I have mail or voice mail like every 15 minutes or so. How do I do that?

    • I’m looking for the same thing. The 1 time audible notification is fine if you are within a close range of your phone, but if you miss that 1 time you’re SOL. A repeating audio notification, like I had with my old Razar, is a necessity.

  4. On my HTC One XL (ICS 4.0.3 + HTC Sense 4.0) the folder paths for custom tones were:
    /Notifications
    /Ringtones

    Then I was able to go to Settings->Personalize->Sound->Notification sounds and set the Message tone for my sms messages.

  6. On my Note running Ice Cream Sandwich, the path is /media/Notifications or /media/Ringtones.
    While I can add custom ringtones through the standard settings/sound menu, I cannot add custom default notification sounds using the same method. Dropping the sound file into the Notifications folder solved this for me!

  7. Great Info. I thought installing another app for this only gives the feature to set custom ringtone. You saved my Phone RAM. :)

    -Venkatx5
    Xperia Ray

  11. Thank you for posting these instructions. I’ve used mostly Windows Mobile phones in the past, and it was pretty much automatic to add sounds with Windows Mobile.

    On Android 4.0.3, I had to jump through a few hoops to get what I wanted.

    Thanks again!

    Chad

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