Change Sound Categories

[Guest awarner [MVP]]

Change Sound Categories

No longer need you be plagued by sounds not behaving as you expect with your profiles, or being in the wrong volume category.

This tweak is only tested on Smartphone devices (but should also work on Pocket PC Phone Edition!)

What does it do?

Just about every system sound on Windows Mobile belongs to a 'category'. Which category a sound is in determines how it's behaviour (such as volume) is controlled.

Well, this tweak shows you where the sound categories are held, where the sounds are held, and how you can change the categories.

How do I do it then?

To begin with, I am going to show you where the sound categories are held.

Spark up your Registry Editor of choice. I have included screenshots below using 'Resco Registry' on the Smartphone, but you'll see pretty much the same thing whatever you are using.

You will be presented with a screen that looks like the following:

Here you see a list of the 'Hives' in the Registry.

The Registry has a 'tree like' structure, which you can navigate by scrolling and clicking, and go back by hitting, well, back :o

Navigate yourself to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Sound Categories

Now you will see before you a list of the 'Sound Categories', on my phone they are Alarm, Attenuation, InCall, Notification, Reminder, Ring and System.

You don't want to edit anything in here, but it's useful for information.

Next, navigate yourself to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Sounds

This is where things get interesting. You will be presented with a list of your system sounds.

If you select a particular sound, e.g. LowBattery, you'll see two values. The first is the category, and the second is the actual name of the sound file itself.

So, by editing these values, you can either change the category of the sound, or even change the sound itself :(

For the LowBattery example, the sound is in the 'System' category. If you wanted it to silence when you turn notifications off, you would change the 'Category' to 'Notification' (look at the 'SMS' value if you want to see what it should look like!)