Changing iPhone SMS Tones

Pretty boring to be limited to only a couple of sounds, right? Well to be honest, i kinda like the default sound, and they are for an SMS, not a call so… But some of you might want to change and personalize your SMS tones. Of course you can do that with ToneFXs , but thats not free, and pretty much all the crack methods out there, work and not really.Well, there always was a way to change the tones as long as you are on a jailbroken device because, yeah you guessed it, you will need to SSH.

First you will need to get some sounds. You can search for them with google or with your favorite P2P client and maybe you can find some torrents. The sounds must be in .aiff format. If they are not .aiff, dont worry just drop them into iTunes ( or any other converter ) and convert them to .aiff.

TIP: if you are on Mac, than you must know Adium. Just go to the Adium site and go to extras. You will find plenty of sounds there.

Once the sounds are ready SSH into your iPhone and go to: /System/Library/Audio/Uisounds.

for example : if your iPhone ip address is 10.23.140.243, from your computer (using ssh or terminal) issue the following command :-

ssh 10.23.140.243 -l root
enter your iphone ssh password for root which is "alpine" by default.
you may change it for security reasons. i'll write another article for it later. :)
updated : here is the article about how to change default iphone ssh password.

There you will have all the default SMS tones. Here’s the tricky part: you must get rid of one of them. Let me explain: just copy the name of the text tone you don’t want and rename your new audio file that name (so if i have new_tone.aiff and sms-received2.caf rename new_tone.aiff to sms-received2.caf) then it will replace that text tone.So if you wanted to replace the chime text tone you would rename your new_tone.aiff to sms-received2.caf and so on for what ever you wanted to change. Enjoy! :)

Note : I'm tested this method using iPhone 2g 8gb (3.1.3) and iPhone 4 16gb (4.0.1). Should work with others iPhone family! :)