The Android way of storing sounds
Android's built-in ringtones, alarms and notification sounds are stored as OGG Vorbis files. Choosing OGG for your own tones therefore fits the system perfectly: every Android phone plays them, and they work in the ringtone, alarm and notification pickers. When you convert M4R to OGG, a tone from your iPhone becomes a native Android sound.
OGG is also the preferred format for many game engines and free programs, such as Godot and Audacity, so the converted tone can be used in a game or app project too.
Settings
Both AAC and Vorbis are lossy, so the tone is decoded and encoded again. To keep the loss tiny, use a Vorbis bitrate similar to the source:
- 128 kbps (quality about 4) for notification and alarm sounds.
- 160 kbps (quality 5) for musical ringtones.
- Mono for short alert sounds; it halves the size and phone speakers are often mono anyway.
A 30-second tone at 160 kbps is about 0.6 MB.
Installing on Android
- Copy the OGG file to the phone.
- Place it in the Ringtones, Notifications or Alarms folder, depending on the use.
- Choose it in the sound settings or in the alarm app.
Some phones also let you select any file directly from a file browser in the ringtone menu.
Notification sounds
A ringtone that loops for 40 seconds is too long for a message sound. For notifications, keep a clear sound of one or two seconds. Cut the start of the tone with Cut, then add a short fade-out so it ends cleanly. If the new sound is too quiet next to the system sounds, Normalize it before converting.
Titles in the M4R are written as Vorbis comments. Copy-protected tones from the early iTunes Store cannot be converted. To turn Android sounds into iPhone tones instead, use OGG to M4R.