If you’ve got bluetooth or similar means by which to connect your cell phone to your computer this article is not for you, as your route is already quite straightforward!
For those of you sick of not having decent ringtones, who do not have (or don’t know how to use) bluetooth, so long as you can access the internet with your cell phone, you can make your own MP3 ring tones and download them to your cell phone.
After trying to IM my custom ring tones to my phone via ICQ and Yahoo Messenger (both would send/receive text IMs but not audio files) I gave up on the IM approach and found the following steps to be the shortest route to creating one’s own MP3 ringtones.
Required Tools:
- Audacity (download and install this free audio editing program)
- lame_enc.dll (unzip this dll file to your hard drive)
The LAME Library is an MP3 encoder. By default Audacity does not export saved audio files as MP3s. By adding the LAME Library to Audacity we will be able to save our music file as an MP3.
- web browsing capabilities on your cell phone
(with my current provider web access is about $6 per month. Depending on your cell phone service provider you may be able to use web access at a prorated amount for just a couple of days. If you have no other use for this web access service you can cancel it, paying anywhere between $1 to the full monthly rate in order to download your new ring tones.)
- Installing the Tools (Using the links above, install Audacity by running the exe file, put the lame_end.dll file on your computer somewhere.)
Start Audacity. Go to Edit>Preferences>File Format and click the Find Library button. Find the lame_enc.dll where you saved it to your computer’s hard drive.
note: You will know the LAME Library is in place when the File Format>MP3 Export Setup portion displays the LAME version.
- Ripping and Editing the Ringtone Music
We need to rip the mp3 or other music file we’ll be using for our ringtone, isolating only the portion of the audio track which we will use as our custom ring tone. Start up Audacity. Open your music file within Audacity (File>Open…).
Click on the selection tool (as highlighted above).
Click on the music track where you want the ringtone to start. Drag the selector to the stopping point (You can reposition the start/end points by hovering just at the point until a pointer hand appears. Click and drag to reposition the point.).
Select Edit>Trim to remove all the music surrounding your ring tone selection. Remember, most cell phones will only play the ring tone for as long as 25 seconds, so there’s absolutely no point in making your custom ring tone file any longer than 25 seconds.
optional: If you want to add a fade out effect, select a smaller portion near the end. From the menu select Effect>Fade-Out. Play around with effects; removing extreme bass and highs can clean up the sound for use as cell phone ring tone.
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Setting the Bit Rate
Under Edit>Preferences>File Format/MP3 Export Setup you will see an item marked Bit Rate. You can try a setting as high as 128, but this is quite high quality and the file may be too large. If this is the case, a rate of 96 is usually an acceptable compromise. You can check the available memory on your cell phone to see how much room you have in which to store your custom ringtone. I try to keep a ring tone file under 400kb.
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Exporting the Custom Ring Tone File
Select File>Export As MP3 and save your new ringtone file to your hard drive.
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Downloading the Mp3 Ring Tone Using WAP
WAP is a kind of simplified set of web application standards, suited for wireless devices such as cell phones. We will use your cell phone’s web access feature to download the new ring tone file.
with your personal computer: Go to http://www.wappal.com. (WAPPAL is a free WAP site; there are many other free WAP Download sites)
Upload your ring tone MP3. When you hit the ‘send file‘ button you will be given an ID number.
with your cell phone: : Access the internet and go to www.wappal.com/wap.php
Fill in the ID number you were given for the file and submit. On the next screen select the ‘download file‘ link and the file will start downloading.
All that’s left now is to change your ring tone to the new file you downloaded. Every phone is different, but on many the downloaded ring tone files are saved to a Files>Sounds type of location. That’s it! nearly painless, wasn’t it?
