Ping: Dave Liquorice or Dave Plowman

[Manticore]

I have a problem with my Android phone. It's an Orange San Francisco and in many respects it's a brilliant bit of kit. It costs less than a hundred quid, is highly customizable and does loads of things. Unfortunately for me, the problem I have is fundamental to its basic existance as a phone - the ringer volume is not loud enough!! :-(

It's great in a quiet room but on the street or in a busy pub there's no chance of hearing it. A lot of people on the Modaco forums are complaining about it and it seems that the guys on there have partially solved the problem in a new ROM, but for reasons too lengthy to mention here I don't want to change ROMs.

Someone suggested a possible solution would be to take a ringtone (I'm using the 'digital phone' at the moment but also have a recording of a BT type 706 phone ringing, which I like) and re-record it at a higher volume. I don't know how the phone itself would handle this but my actual question is, is it possible to take one recording and re-record it louder, and if so, what software would I need to do this?

Cheers chaps

[Thomas Prufer]

If using windows, the low-budget way: "sndrec32.exe". There's a "increase volume by 25%" thing in one of the menus, and it can be applied repeatedly.

No gurantees or representations as to quality etc., mind.

Thomas Prufer

[Manticore]

Cheers Thomas, thanks for that - seems like a very easy way to do what I want. I'll have to see about quality but in this case, quantity wins over quality anyway :-)

[John Williamson]

If it's the same recording I got off the web, it's already at full scale, anyway, so you'll not be able to get it louder.

If it's an MP3 recording, then Audacity will do it natively. There is also a tag for gain in the mp3 metadata, which can be altered. This may increase the volume if the Android playback mechanism can support it.

Other than that, it's a common problem I've found with new phones.

[Skipweasel]

Assuming your phone uses mp3 ringtones (some do, but I'm not up on fancy modern phones) then there are plenty of freeware mp3 volume adjusters.

This...

be persuaded to make a single file louder.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

My guess is this wouldn't help much. It's likely to be the sounder or the amp driving it that's not up to the job rather than the signal level.

However, pretty well any software designed for recording an audio signal will have the ability to alter the level.

[jkn]

Is it the 'loudness' you want to increase, or the 'noticability'?

If the latter, and the loudness as as good as it gets (ie. the MP3 is already normalised to 100%) you might be better off tinkering with the frequency spectrum of the ringtone. I'm guessing that the higher frequencies get better reproduced by the Android 'speaker' than the lower, so performing the equivalent of a 'turn the treble up' via Audacity or similar might improve matters for you.

I also suspect that there are cleverer tricks to improve the noticability, along the lines of simulating a clipping transducer, but I don't know for sure.

I have a fairly low-frequency ringtone on my ancient Nokia, and it's not very noticable. I keep meaning to do something similar with that...

HTH J^n

[John Williamson]

The 706 bell sound has a useful spectral range for cutting through background, and is very noticeable, certainly on all the phones I've tried. The Trimphone ring sound also cuts through background noise quite well, but can be hard to locate.

[Manticore]

Thanks everyone for all the input :-)

[<me9]

Here's one I prepared earlier

[Andy Burns]

Audacity (available for most O/S) try the compressor/amplify/normalise effects ...