My iPhone has Lost its Quack

Software
1

For many years, ever since I got my first iPhone - a 5 - I have used the Classic “Duck” tone to signal arrival of a text message. However, I recently noticed that I hadn’t heard the duck for a while, and when I finally got around to looking at the settings, I found that the Duck is now only available as a ring tone, not a text tone, and so my text tone had been set to the (weedily inaudible!) default. This was presumably changed by a recent IOS update or possibly during the provisioning of my new iPhone 12 Mini.

I have a very vague recollection that this may have happened once before, some years ago, and that I fixed it by using iTunes to copy the duck tone into the relevant folder. However, this is 2020, and with all of my Macs running Catalina there isn’t an iTunes app any more to do that with!

I really miss the quack my phone made on receiving texts - it amused my friends and colleagues, and gave me a little harmless fun! (Yes, I know - pathetic, but harmless!) Does anyone have any suggestions how I might restore the Duck to its rightful place, so that my new iPhone can continue to provide the enjoyment and satisfaction I got from its predecessors, the iPhones 5 and 8?

2

As long as you do have a backup:

Or from Apple:

iTunes is gone, but its functionality is still available in Apple Music and in the Finder regarding the syncing with a Mac.

If you have to recover it from your old iPhone, a tool like iMazing might be of help.

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3

That tone is not all it’s quacked up to be. :slight_smile:

I’ll get my coat. :slight_smile:

4 Likes
4

Well, thank you for pointing me at that Apple article! I connected the iPhone to the Mac with a cable (It’s so long since I last did that that I’d almost forgotten one could do so!). It immediately said that a software update was needed, which took a minute or so, and then I had to confirm that I trusted the Mac. And then, as if by magic, the Duck was back!

Thank you for pointing me at the obvious - which was so obvious I’d never have thought of it in a million years! :slight_smile:

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5

Quackers …
.
.
:slight_smile:

6

Don’t forget to let Safari default to DuckDuckGo so that your iPhone’s muscle memory of quacking is refreshed from time to time.

3 Likes