My phone stopped detecting custom notification sounds (but custom ringtone sounds still work)

Question

I installed some custom notifications sounds on my BLU Advance 5.5 running Android 6.0 a few months ago and they've worked fine for a really long time until when recently all my notification sounds went back to default, so I try to change back to any of the old custom sounds that I'd been using, but they won't show up in the options. My custom ringtone sounds didn't change and still work fine, but my notification sounds just won't show up.

I've tried rebooting, renaming, changing the location of the file(s), and clearing the cache, but nothing works.

I don't know what to do anymore.

Answer 1

The fix for me was to rename the custom sound files (the .mp3s) and make sure they started with Capital letters. Seems crazy I know, but the one thing I noticed that was different about my custom files and the stock ones was that mine weren't capitalized. As soon as I changed that, they all showed up and I was able to select them. My phone is a Samsung Galaxy A51.

Answer 2

Any sound files stored in a folder named

Notifications

will be found by the system and displayed as an option for a Notification sound

Any sound files stored in a folder named

Ringtones

will be found by the system and displayed as an option for a Ringtone sound

Note that it doesn't matter where in the system your Notifications or Ringtones folders are stored, Android will still find them. Notifications in /media/notifications will be found, and so will sound files in /Music/Notifications. You can also have more than one Notifications or Ringtones folders.