Here’s how to customize the rings sound played on your Ubiquiti Unfi Doorbell G4. At the time of writing ubiquiti does not offer any option to customize the sound played on the doorbell when it’s pressed (not the chime, the noise the camera doorbell makes itself). So here it goes.
Prerequisite
You are going to have to enable ssh access to your ubquiti camera’s on your instance of unifi protect (udm, udmpro, cloudkey). This is done by connecting through ssh to your instance runnning unifi protect. And creating/editing the config file to allow this, see ubiquiti website.
Getting the correct sound file
The sound files played on the doorbell have some specific properties that need to be taken in to account. We can’t just slap any audiofile on there and expect it to play. The following is what I did:
- If not the case: install audacity (audio editing software, free & open source).
- Find a suitable audio piece. Probably not too crazy long, can be shortened in audacity.
- Adapt the gain levels to make sure it’s not too quiet.
- Convert the track to mono
- Export to .wav in 16kbps
Beam the sound file to the doorbell
Copy it using scp to the doorbell, note that the destionation file is custom.wav for ease of use later:
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scp insert_your_song.wav ubnt@doorbell_ip:/var/etc/sounds/custom.wav
Edit configuration files
Under /var/etc/persistent there are some config files we need to play with:
vi /var/etc/persistent/ubnt_sounds_leds.conf
Press i for edit, edit the “Chime.wav” to “../../../../var/etc/persistent/custom.wav” then press ESC and then :x to save. Hit enter.
cat /var/etc/persistent/ubnt_sounds_leds.conf
Verify that the output looks like this
Now all that’s left to do is to get the ubnt_sounds_leds daemon to restart so:
- Search for the PID of the ubnt_sounds_leds:
ps
- Execute the command to kill that daemon:
kill -TERM __your-PID__
And that is it, go ring the doorbell to verify. Do note that this will all reset if the doorbell camera loses power and restarts. Have not found a way to make it permanent just yet.