Create your own ring tones ☆ kevinleary.net

Create your own ring tones

Posted in Mobile by kevin on March 31, 2008

What you need

Cell phone with MP3 ring-tone support
CD or MP3 of the song
Method of transferring the ring tone from computer to phone (USB, Bluetooth, e-mail, instant message, etc.)
Audacity

How to do it

For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll assume that you have a good quality .mp3 file of the song you wish to use as your cell phone ring tone.

Be sure to make a copy of the .mp3 file, we’ll be cutting it up into smaller bits and we don’t want to mess up the original copy.

Step 1 Setting up Audacity with the LAME MP3 Library

First download a copy of Audacity here. Install the program on your hard drive. As a side note I’ve chosen to use the Beta: 1.3.4 release for this tutorial.
Next, download the LAME Library here. For questions about this step, refer to Audacity’s documentation here.
Save the LAME Library somewhere permanent and open up Audacity.
Run Audacity, go to the Audacity / Preferences menu, and click the Find Library button near the bottom of the screen. I’m using the Beta Release on a Mac and I need to go to Audacity / Preferences / File Formats section to see the Find Library button.

Step 2 Editing the MP3 and creating the ring tone

In Audacity go to File / Open and search for the copy of your .mp3 file that you created earlier.
Select the portion of audio you want to use for your ringtone (say 15-20 seconds). To do this, click in the audio track and drag a selection area to left or right with your mouse - you can see the length of the selected audio in the timeline above the track. Many phones will loop the ringtone automatically (repeat it over and over), so choose your selection area with that in mind. To hear your selection play looped in Audacity, type L on the keyboard or hold down SHIFT while clicking the green Play button. To stop the playback, hit spacebar or click the yellow Stop button.
Click Edit > Trim. This will remove the rest of the file, leaving only the section you selected.
Save your trimmed file in a format that your cell phone can read. You need to check what type of file format your phone requires for its ringtones, and whether the file needs to be mono or stereo. For the LG VX-5400 I saved my files as a 64 kbps .mp3.

Step 3 Getting the file to your phone

This is the tricky part. There are numerous ways to do this, I’ll go over a few.

USB: With verizon, some phones have the capability to connect to a computer via a USB cable. This one isn’t recommended unless absolutely necessary because these cords can cost anywhere from $20-$50 depending on your phone.
Bluetooth: Verizon limits what each specific phone is capable of doing with bluetooth. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge Verizon doesn’t allow bluetooth file transfer capabilities on their phones.
Email: If you send an email with the ring tone file as an attachment to XXXXXXXXXX@vzwpix.com it will be sent to your cell phone as verizon PIX message. Replace XXXXXXXXXX with your ten digit phone number. Once it arrives you should have the option to save it as a ring tone (look under options).

LG VX-5400 Results

I ended up using the Email tactic above to get my ring tone onto my cell phone. Digging around forums I heard various numbers pop up concerning file size limitations. I’m assuming it varies with each cell phone. For the LG VX-5400 I couldn’t seem to send anything larger than 72KB.