Ring tones and wait tones¶

Custom audio on the head unit, and the tooling to prepare it.

What the unit plays¶

All plain PCM WAV. Two formats, depending on the slot:

Wait-tone languages: CRC CZC DUN ENG FRF GED HRH ITI PLP PTP RUR SPE TRT. The RT suffix in the ring-tone filenames is part of the real name.

Full inventory with durations is in Media partition.

The tool¶

tools/ringtones.py — no Python dependencies; uses ffmpeg when it needs to decode anything other than an already-correct WAV (so mp3, ogg, flac, m4a all work). Without ffmpeg it will still copy a WAV that is already in the target format.

python3 tools/ringtones.py list                          # slots and expected formats
python3 tools/ringtones.py probe song.mp3                # what is this file?
python3 tools/ringtones.py export --tree media/ -o stock/ # back up the stock tones
python3 tools/ringtones.py convert song.mp3 --slot ring1 -o ring1RT.wav
python3 tools/ringtones.py stage song.ogg --slot ring5 --tree media/

--tree is an extracted media partition — a directory containing ring_tones/ and wait_tones/. stage converts to the exact format and writes it under the correct filename, ready to be packed back up.

GUI¶

tools/ringtone_studio.py (Qt / PySide6) wraps the same conversion, lets you preview and export the stock tones, and builds patched packages from the bundled patches/*.json definitions — including the always-enable-AUX and sticky-AUX variants. Multiple definitions can be ticked at once; a conflicting address is reported rather than silently applied.

pip install -r tools/requirements-gui.txt
python3 tools/ringtone_studio.py

The studio builds and runs (verified on macOS with PySide6 6.11.2 — it also has headless GUI tests in tests/test_studio.py, which skip when PySide6 is absent). It has not been used to produce a package that was then flashed to a car, so treat the end-to-end result as unverified; the pieces it drives are covered by tests.

The catch¶

The tones live inside the media partition (system.bin), so changing them means repacking that gzip'd tar and rebuilding its checksum cascade — the same job as the cheatcode menu and the version marker.

That repack used to be blocked on the SIZE: / SIZE_1..SIZE_32 fields. It no longer is: they are computable from the tar (see Media partition).

That tool now exists — tools/patch_media.py swaps a file inside the tar and rebuilds system_ctrl.bin -> system.bin -> system.bin.inf -> the module manifest -> the root manifest. A replacement tone changes size, so the tar definitely changes; the SIZE fields are carried forward by exactly that change.