Thursday, October 15, 2009

Sprint HTC Hero Android Phone Custom Notification

The only thing I found real difficulty with in it's initial intuitiveness on the Android phone was setting the custom notification sounds for various things to sound unique.

For instance, I have specific inbound emails that come from my alarm monitoring company when a server goes down and I need it to wake up the dead when the alarm goes off not just go "BING!" and go away.

So here's the dirt on making custom ringtones.

Plug your Android phone into the USB cable, mount it, and then create the following top level folders:

/notifications
/ringtones
/alarms

Those folders add new sounds for notifications, ringtones and the alarm clock respectively, just drag and drop your .wav and .mp3 files into these folders and they'll be visible in the list of sounds after you unmount the drive.

I uploaded a few very loud MP3 files and then set each notification accordingly.

To make a custom SMS or email message notification click on:
MESSAGES -> MENU -> SETTINGS -> SELECT SOUND

The files you uploaded into notifications should appear on the list.

Likewise, if you want to make custom gmail notification sounds:
GMAIL -> MENU -> SETTINGS -> SELECT SOUND

The software needs a little work to make this easier or some programmer with time to burn should crank out an app, but at least it can be done with a minimum of fuss.

12 comments:

Urbexy said...

Yep I had the same issue when setting up my Hero. The UI could use a few tweaks in that area.

hinesw said...

Do you know of a way to make separate sounds for SMS and e-mail notifications? Just got a Hero the other day, and I like it, but I'm having trouble with the notifications....

Urbexy said...

When you set up the default sound it becomes system wide.

To set another sound for sms go to your inbox, press the menu key them Tao settings. Scroll down to choose sound. It will be set to default notification as standard. You can select any other sound and set it as sms alert.

Mack.

TWH547 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
TWH547 said...

To continue with this, is there a way to make a custom notification that continues to alert you with a tone, chime, mp3, etc. until you acknowledge it? A one time voicemail alert and a flashing LED won't wake me up in the middle of the night if I miss a call. Thanks.

Unknown said...

Thanks so much for this, it was driving me nuts!

I would like to add that the new notification sounds only showed up in the list after a reboot.

john said...

Use dgalert classic, works great

Brad Carpenter said...

Tried to follow directions...still didn't work even after reboot. Can't find on my phone how to select the different folders to view the new sounds I drug into those folders.

DJ said...

Do you put the / sign when you create it?

Beccity98 said...

I'm unable to put the / sign.

AAB said...

This works great thanks.

Jerry Fuselier said...

Very nice. Thx!