Set number of audible rings

Question

I've found articles on setting the number of rings before my phone goes to voicemail, but I want something different:

I want something in between "silent" and "ringing out loud the default number times (7 or so)".

I want the phone to ring out loud once or twice, and then continue to "ring" silently -- ie, I would still have time to get to my phone before it went to voicemail.

The problem is that 7 rings is almost never needed, since I hear the phone on the first or second ring -- the remaining rings are just an insistent audio annoyance.

Answer 1

Make a ringtone 40 seconds long, but containing only silence after the first 5 seconds or so.

Digital Trends have a full tutorial, though it's using an existing tune from iTunes. They also say maximum ringtone length is 30s. I always thought it was 40, so you might need to experiment.

You could quite easily do this in something like Audacity. Copy in 5s of audio but save a file 30s long. I'm not sure whether it can save AAC, but if not, save as WAV then use something like XLD to convert to AAC [m4a]. Manually change the extension to m4r & you have a ringtone.

Answer 2

There in no setting/configuration available in iOS which can be used to achieve the desired customization.

I think the prevailing solution is to silence the audible ringer and wear an Apple watch so you can discretly check on a call and answer directly or choose to handle the call on the phone. For the near future, the phone will likely ring when it's ringing and not when it's not.