If you’ve recently purchased a new Samsung Galaxy S5 and want to create custom ringtones or use your own music for ringtones, it’s super easy thanks to a few options in the settings. Adding or changing a ringtone is pretty common and something most users should know by now, but if you’re new to it, we’ve got you covered.
With Samsung Galaxy S5 users, there’s actually a pretty wide selection of ringtones to choose from, most of them pretty obnoxious and not my favourite, but a few that are pretty good and chirpy. However, if you want to add a song from your music collection, we’ll explain how to do that below.
Of course, there are many apps for ringtones on the Google Play Store, and most of them offer tons of music absolutely free. Some are just short clips or even actual songs sung by someone else if they don’t have the rights to use the music. Instead of messing around with all this or downloading another app, use your own music with the steps outlined below.
If you are like me and tired of the boring and generic ringtones on your Galaxy S5, go to your device and browse through all the audio files on your device and choose something different. You may need to copy music from your computer to your phone, but that only requires a USB cable and a quick copy/paste job. Otherwise, you can choose between downloads via Google Music or 3rd party apps like the ones below. Zedge.
The Galaxy S5 whistle notification is extremely popular and I hear it constantly when I’m out because millions of phones have been sold. The same can be said for ringtones on the phone, so let’s go ahead and pick one of our own ringtones and customize it a bit.
Instructions
The first step, of course, is to make sure you have music stored on your phone. If they’re in the cloud with Google Music and that doesn’t work, they must be stored locally on your device. This is easily accomplished by plugging your Galaxy S5 into a computer and adding whatever you want.
On a PC, go to My Computer, open your Galaxy S5 and click and drag any music you want to the “Music” folder located on the Galaxy S5. Mac users will need Android File Transfer Select the tool and then click and drag in the same way. Continue to follow the pictures below after adding some music you want to use.
To get started, you need to go to settings by pulling down the notification bar and hitting the top right gear-shaped settings button. Once in settings, go to “Sound” and tap “Ringtones” to get started.
From here you will see the list of stock ringtones provided with the Galaxy S5. At the bottom of the screen are Cancel, Add or OK. Instead of choosing from a few boring options Samsung has out of the box, you’ll tap “Add” and choose your own music from the device’s internal storage.
If you have Dropbox, Zedge or a few other music apps, you may see a popup on how to add the ringtone, so choose the one you want or tap the “sound selector”. This will take you to an audio selector option including Music, Albums, Artists and more, and all you have to do is scroll down and find the music you want to use. It’s that easy. Find the songs you’ve imported, choose what you want to hear when people call you, and add them. Then go back to Ringtones, scroll through the list and choose your preferred song.
This adds the song to your ringtone list and then you need to go back to the ringtone selection and find it to apply the song.
Appropriately, Samsung has integrated an “auto-suggestions” feature that will somehow magically extract the highlights of the song. This is great for ringtones as well as for other notifications so you don’t have to cut a specific part of the song yourself. It works pretty well and has managed to make a few excellent Breaking Bad and Sublime ringtones for me.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 is packed with minor tweaks or features like this one, and be sure to check out our full Galaxy S5 How-To Portal to find out more.