This is a little post sharing my experience with getting my ringtones back on my HTC Desire Z (running official Gingerbread release).
**UPDATE 02-Dec-2011 This did not seem to survive a reboot. Worked when I copied the files across, but now the extra ringtones are no longer there.
I transferred my ringtones (in .m4a format) from my BlackBerry to Android phone some time ago. They worked perfectly. Came up in the menu. Everything was working. Then I decided to clean up the SD card to make some more space. In the cleanup I moved the ringtones off the phone. Most disappointed as I had made these myself.
After finding the files back, I thought I’d put them in a nice directory called
ringtones
under the
/media
directory. That turned out to do nothing, so I looked up where to put these files. Everywhere seemed to suggest just creating the
ringtones
directory (noting the lower case ‘r’) in the root of the SD card. That didn’t work either.
Then came the real clue – some advice to put them in a directory called
/media/audio/ringtones
So I created that directory (there was already a /media/audio/notifications but not a ringtones counterpart). I used the File Manager app to create the directory and move one of the ringtones there. Strange thing – once that directory existed, the phone found all of the .m4a files I had put there, so the other ringtones appeared as well.
So it seems that to use .m4a format ringtones, all you need is the directory /media/autio/ringtones to exist, and it will find other ringtones directories. Would need further testing, but the origninal ringtones from the first import were in /BlackBerry/ringtones and they worked perfectly. Odd behaviour overall. Would need some work to completely flesh out, but at least I have better understanding of where those files should be.
The distinction about .m4a files is that you can add any .mp3 media file as a ringtone, located anywhere on your SD card. There is a separate built-in add ringtone function for this.