Hopefully this isn't a dumb question. A forum search about custom notifications showed an unanswered question from 2010 and another thread saying you can only have custom ones if you jailbreak the iPAD back in May 2011. But, I found conflicting information on the web, including one article dated October 2011 stating adding custom tones was now possible. It said you could do it for the iPad, but then only talked about the iPhone.

I have a standard notification tone I use on my laptops and Droid phone. I recently received an iPad 2 as a gift and wanted the same tone since it's wired into my brain as the new email sound.

I loaded it into iTunes on my PC and did the right click --> Create AAC version to make the .m4a version. I then changed the file format to .m4r, moved it to my device in iTunes, showed the Tones directory, copy/pasted it there, and then synced.

It now shows up in the music app on my iPad, but not in the list of notification tones or ringtones as a selection for the new mail notification.

Am I missing a step? Or are the articles I'm reading wrong and you can't do it for the iPad 2?

Originally Posted by Cable2001

Hopefully this isn't a dumb question. A forum search about custom notifications showed an unanswered question from 2010 and another thread saying you can only have custom ones if you jailbreak the iPAD back in May 2011. But, I found conflicting information on the web, including one article dated October 2011 stating adding custom tones was now possible. It said you could do it for the iPad, but then only talked about the iPhone.

I have a standard notification tone I use on my laptops and Droid phone. I recently received an iPad 2 as a gift and wanted the same tone since it's wired into my brain as the new email sound.

I loaded it into iTunes on my PC and did the right click --> Create AAC version to make the .m4a version. I then changed the file format to .m4r, moved it to my device in iTunes, showed the Tones directory, copy/pasted it there, and then synced.

It now shows up in the music app on my iPad, but not in the list of notification tones or ringtones as a selection for the new mail notification.

Am I missing a step? Or are the articles I'm reading wrong and you can't do it for the iPad 2?

The first thing that comes to mind is that you haven't enabled syncing of ringtones in iTunes under the device settings, but assuming you have it should be listed at the very top of the section title Ringtones on the screen where you can change the alert sound.

I use a custom tone for new mail alerts on my iPad 2 and have since I got it back in October, so it can definitely be done. I do know from personal experience if the tone is short (less than 2 seconds when I was experimenting) they won't always show up.

Well, I got it to go but I'm not sure how because I tried multiple things. I ended up pasting and adding the file to the Tones directories in both the main Library and Devices in iTunes. After multiple syncs it suddenly showed up.