Make Your Own Ring Tones
Wired has an article describing the basic steps needed to make your own ring tones for your cell phone. Your phone needs to support MP3 playback for this to work. Using the open source Audacity software with LAME MP3 encoder, you take a chunk of your favorite song and save it as a separate file. Transfer that MP3 file to your phone and select it as your ring tone. Pretty darn easy.
As a quick and dirty test, I tried out the steps with my Motorola V540. Oh da easy! I transfered the file using Bluetooth, and the V540 then played back the sound file and asked if I wanted to save it as my default ring tone. Now I got Police’s Message in a Bottle (the “Sending out an SOS” part) as my ring tone. Later on, I’ll add Kanye West’s Diamonds from Sierra Leone as a ring tone.
February 7, 2006 @ 9:30 am
How long is your phone able to play a “song”? Heard that phones may have a limitation as to how long the ringtone plays.
You know it’s kind of a bummer when you’re singing along and then you have to answer the phone before it gets to the really good part. =)
February 7, 2006 @ 10:38 am
I limited my song to about 15-20 seconds. Main limitation is memory. My phone has non-expandable RAM so can’t hog the memory with my music.
I tried to get the good part of the song so I don’t have to ignore the caller.
February 7, 2006 @ 11:58 am
Converted 7 seconds of the beginning of Diamonds from Sierra Leone as another ring tone. Added the weird Phaser effect. In all, took about 5 minutes from start to finish. Fun!
December 12, 2007 @ 12:29 pm
An easier method is to use this website. I haven’t used Audacity before though, so I don’t know what it is like yet. I know people who edit MP3s in Audacity but I’m not that smart 🙂