Change default alarm sound

Today I was looking for a way to change the sound that is applied by default to new alarms you create in the Alarms app. After quite a bit of effort I came upon the following procedure:

1. Install ES File Explorer
2. Open it and select / from the Favorites
3. Browse to /system/media/audio/alarms
4. Click on the file you want and in the "Open with" prompt select "ES Media Player"
5. Click on the bell beside the file name, pick "Set alarm" and click OK

Should you choose to change again the default, you may notice that the defaults you pick will appear in the music library. Also, they will be listed twice in the tone selection list which appears when you manually change the tone of an individual alarm.

You can fix that with the following steps:

1. Open Settings
2. Go to Applications > Manage Applications > All
3. Click on Media Storage and then Clear data
4. Reboot your phone
5. You will now have to set your new default sound

(I've noticed that sometimes, when you view a music album which doesn't have a cover art image and add an album.jpg file to it later, Music Player will not use that file for the cover art. The above steps, as a side effect, will make Music Player look for images for all albums, thus having the cover art of all your albums updated.)

Hope this helps

 

Important news! I was playing around with android and discovered that you can manually change the default alarm tone without any obscure program like ES File Manager. Just do the following (you'll need adb -- Android Debug Bridge -- or something similar):

1. Copy "/data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db" to your computer. If you can't do that directly (with adb, for example) copy the file to /mnt/sdcard, and then to your computer. Do the same for "/data/data/com.android.providers.media/databases/internal.db" and "/data/data/com.android.providers.media/databases/external-<something>.db".

2. If you don't already have a program like SQLite Browser on your computer, download it from here: SQLite Database Browser.

3. Open internal.db with SQLite Browser, go to the "Browse Data" tab, navigate to table "audio_meta", and scroll down until you see the file you'd like to have as the default tone. Take note of its "id" field value.

(screenshot)

4. If you don't want any of those files, open external-<something>.db with SQLite Browser, go to the "Browse Data" tab, navigate to table "audio_meta", and scroll down until you see the file you'd like to have as the default tone. Take note of its "id" field value.

5. Now pay attention, it's very important that you remember not only the id but also which file you used: internal.db or external-<something>.db!

6. Open settings.db with SQLite Browser, go to the "Browse Data" tab, navigate to table "system", and scroll down until you see an entry whose name is "alarm_alert". Double-click the "value" field of that entry.

(screenshot)

7. You will probably be shown a string like "content://media/internal/audio/media/39". You may have to change two things: first, the word "internal", and second, the number "39". (Of course you may see a different number in your file)

(screenshot)

8. If you got your id from internal.db, set the word to "internal". If you got your id from external-<something>.db, set the word to "external".

9. Replace the number with the id you got earlier.

(screenshot)

10. Save settings.db and close it. Now copy it back to "/data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db" (once again, you may need to copy first to /mnt/sdcard and from there to where you need). Please notice that this will overwrite the old file. (If you don't want to overwrite it you may consider moving the old file to "/data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db.old")

11. Restart your phone.

12. Try to create a new alarm and see if the default tone is now what you wanted!

 

I agree with you, ninja_reject, it's better to have an app to take care of all that alarm stuff; the settings.db method is really not good for managing individual alarms. However it is invaluable if you have to fix corrupted settings, or if you want to change your *default* tone (something people will do once in a blue moon).

(By the way, all that thing does sound fun to me! I guess I like computers a little too much )