How to create a ringtone that fades in?

[sracer]

I've created ringtones that fade in over the first 4 seconds but when I put them on my iPhone, they play at full volume from the beginning. The files correctly fade in when played on my Mac.

Is there a way to create a ringtone that fades in on the iPhone?

I was thinking that maybe I could insert a tone at a high frequency that wouldn't be audible but would prevent the iPhone from normalizing the volume (if that what it is doing)

 

[chown33]

I think that's a test worth doing.

I'd use infrasound instead of ultrasonic, though, mainly to avoid any issues that arise with the sample rate. Maybe append a few cycles of a 10 Hz sine wave at the end of the sample file. That seems like something Audacity could easily handle.

Audacity ® | Download for macOS

Download Audacity for macOS and OS X

www.audacityteam.org

If the infrasound addition doesn't work, try it with near-infrasound, say 30 Hz. It's conceivable that whatever dark magic is removing the fade-in might have filtering that could eliminate infrasound. Put it in the audio range, and see what happens.

 

[sracer]

I think that's a test worth doing.

I'd use infrasound instead of ultrasonic, though, mainly to avoid any issues that arise with the sample rate. Maybe append a few cycles of a 10 Hz sine wave at the end of the sample file. That seems like something Audacity could easily handle.

Audacity ® | Download for macOS

Download Audacity for macOS and OS X

www.audacityteam.org

If the infrasound addition doesn't work, try it with near-infrasound, say 30 Hz. It's conceivable that whatever dark magic is removing the fade-in might have filtering that could eliminate infrasound. Put it in the audio range, and see what happens.

Thanks for the suggestion. I had been using audacity to create the ringtones before but I thought that I must have been doing something wrong since the fade in wasn't working on the iPhone.

I experimented with different frequency tones to see what the effect would be. By adding a 20k Hz tone that had max volume for the entire length, enabled the desired audio to fade in as expected. Using other frequencies resulted in unexpected results (on playing the ringtone, it would be higher or lower frequency).

Overlaying a tone at the end of the clip didn't preserve the fade in. Apparently the Phone doesn't try to normalize the entire clip... just process it on-the-fly.

Overlaying a tone at the beginning of the clip for the duration of the fade in did not work. (I didn't expect this)

Only overlaying a tone for the duration of the clip worked. The only hiccup is that there is a single "click" sound as the ringtone begins to play.

Whatever Apple is doing with these audio files as ringtones is very odd IMO. Makes sense since the desire for a fade-in ringtone on an iPhone seems to be an odd request. (I haven't found anything online that discusses the issue). 😂

I also checked Accessibility Settings to see if there was an override for this behavior... nope.

Thanks again for your suggestions.