Why differentiate between sounds?

I did not see a similar thread after searching, and I apologize if this is the wrong forum... but...

Why did Apple need to differentiate between ring tones and other system sounds? It seems to me this is an unnecessary restriction, and it annoys me that I cannot select the "alarm" ringtone - you know, that irritating claxon thing - as my SMS alert tone.

I am using the iPhone as my pager, and the little brief sounds that are permissible as SMS alerts don't wake me up.

I wish they would just provide a single pool of sounds and you can select any one for any function - and allow changing all of them (not just email and SMS).

And while I'm at it, :tounge: why does the system bother with the different extensions (m4a, m4r, etc), if they are really the exact same thing with just a different last letter? All I need to do is rename an M4a to M4r and *poof* it's a ringtone. Why can't an M4a be a ringtone?

Thanks for listening. That is all...


- Jim.

Can't answer the questions, but to solve your problem, it would seem likely that someone with a jailbroken phone could copy the alarm tone out so that it can be renamed a .m4r and re-imported as a ringtone.

Maybe some kind soul will copy all of them out for us?

That won't work because the problem is the other way around. I need the "alarm" ringtone to become an SMS or "new text message" tone, and these tones are not customizable on OTB phones.

I do realize that jailbreaking will solve this for me (in a manner of speaking), but my real point was the unnecessary (or is it?) compartmentalizing of such things by system designers. What ever happened to orthogonality? :frown:

Ah, sorry about that... I'm bass-ackwards today. Like everything else, we'll have to pile it on the SDK/Apple Update/Jailbroken App wishlist.

Unfortunately, Apple seems to have wanted the iPhone locked down pretty tight. Since it's their first step out into the mobile phone market, they were bound to make mistakes, a few of them larger than others. They must have gotten the impression that people will simply suck it up and deal with it. And for the most part, (take a look at how many they have sold) a lot of us did. The remaining group hacked the phone and "fixed" some of the problems.
The only thing we as customers can do, is constantly fill out the feedback form for the iphone on Apple's site and hope that with enough emails, they get the message and DO something about it.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Which thread is that? I can't seem to find a single "what should Apple fix" thread. One would think there would be a moderated sticky version of this...

I was more thinking of the mental list we all have in our heads (and scattered in random posts here and there). Not sure if anyone's taken the time to compile an actual list.

There is at least one list, but the problem is that people comment the post without contributing, leading to a very long thread with a few "suggestions" here and there.
Now if Everything Chris would be interested in making a sticky, locking it, and only accepting legitimate suggestions through PM, then we might be able to compile one.