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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

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 :-)

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

Thanks everyone for all the input :-)

Here's one I prepared earlier

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