Solved How can I change the default sounds?

Hi,

It is claimed that selecting Personalize > Themes > Sounds allows you to replace the default sounds with another .wav sound. It doesn't.
As I am unhappy with the changes made by MS to the Win 10 sound scheme, I took ownership of the Windows/Media folder and then copied the sounds across from the same in Windows.old. When testing them in Explorer, they have indeed replaced the default sounds, however, Windows still only plays the default Windows 11 sounds.

Is there any known fix for this, please?

None of the options in that tutorial work in 24H2 but I think I have discovered why.
I wanted to use the sounds I was familiar with from Windows 10 but selecting them from the Windows.old folder made no difference. Even after taking ownership of the Media folder and copy/pasting the sounds across to the current Media folder, they played correctly in Explorer but not when selected in the Sounds personalization app.

Running scannow resulted in a message saying errors were found but Windows was unable to repair them. In the logs, some files in the Media folder were shown as corrupted. Clearly, this was because I had pasted them across from the Win 10 backup. I solved that by running C:\Windows\System32\Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth.

Somewhat fed-up and frustrated with this situation, I decided to try an experiment by copying and pasting the sounds I wanted to use to a different folder and then renaming them. For example, I changed 'Windows Hardware Insert' to 'Device Insert'. Then I pasted them back into the Windows.old/Media directory. Lo and behold, they now work! What this suggests is that if the file you want to use has the same name as the file in the Windows Media folder, Windows will not accept the change seeing it as a corruption of the original file. But, if the file has a name that was not already present in the Media folder, it is accepted as a custom theme, in which case the standard personalization options should work as well.

Glad you got it resolved yourself. As an FYI for the future, when you do non-standard stuff like you described in the last post, always tell us in your original thread. We're in the dark until you give us all the pertinent info that leads up to a problem..

glasskuter said:

Glad you got it resolved yourself. As an FYI for the future, when you do non-standard stuff like you described in the last post, always tell us in your original thread. We're in the dark until you give us all the pertinent info that leads up to a problem..

Click to expand...

My original post detailed everything I had done in full, at that particular time. There was nothing else I could have added. What I detailed in my last post were the actions I took after my original post.

What I did was create a folder in the media folder and placed all my custom sounds in that folder.
Then I changed all the sounds to what I wanted that are in that folder and saved the sound scheme.
This way if I change the theme I can just change the sounds to my sound scheme.
You might want to change owner of media back to TrustedInstaller.

NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller

KevTech said:

What I did was create a folder in the media folder and placed all my custom sounds in that folder.
Then I changed all the sounds to what I wanted that are in that folder and saved the sound scheme.
This way if I change the theme I can just change the sounds to my sound scheme.
You might want to change owner of media back to TrustedInstaller.

NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller

Click to expand...

Good idea. Just from curiosity, have you run scannow since doing that?
I don't need to change the ownership of the folder back because Windows already did that when I ran the RestoreHealth command.

QuicktellPro said:

have you run scannow since doing that?

Click to expand...

I did this years ago and some of the sounds I use are from windows 7.
DISM and sfc are clean.

Good news! My workaround seems to have worked but I think yours is just as efficient, if not even more.