If you use an iPhone, you know the ringtones that come with it suck. Big time. They aren’t loud enough to hear if you carry the phone in your pocket. After much searching, I’ve stumbled upon a ringtone that is really loud, and does the job well. As a bonus, there are 3 tones for SMS which are slightly louder than the ones built in.

For the ringtone, download the .m4r file here. Simply drag the file to iTunes, and it will show up as a new ringtone. Then you can sync your iPhone and voila, the tone will magically pop up in the Settings -> Sounds -> Ringtone menu.

To replace the SMS tones, you will need to access the filesystem on the iPhone, and then replace a couple of files.

• This can be done either via openSSH (if your phone is jailbroken) or you can use a program like iPhoneBrowser
• Navigate to /System/Library/Audio/UISounds directory
• The tones have the extension .caf. You will find 6 files named as sms-received1.caf to sms-received6.caf
• The iPhone OS does not allow us to add new SMS tones. Even if you drop in a new tone as sms-received7.caf, the tone will not pop up in the menu. So you will have to replace the tones that you do not like with the newer tones
• Get the 3 tones here. Expand the iPhone tab, and download the 3 .caf files
• Rename the files to the tones you want to replace (by default, the files will replace the last 3 tones, that is Horn, bell and electronic)
• Make a backup of the original files in the directory and replace the new files
• Goto Settings -> Sounds -> New Text Message and select the tones that you replaced. Note that the name of the tones will still be the same, but the actual tone would have changed by now

And thats that. Drop in your comments/doubts if any.