Hands on: Create your own ringtones

Not that long ago mobile phones rang out with monophonic renditions of well-known tunes that often sounded worse than a bunch of cats being strangled. Thankfully those days are gone and most phones can play digital recordings of real music.

Although this means you now hear some dodgy ringtones, such as the samba ditty on your manager’s phone, it has stopped the problem of everyone simultaneously reaching into their pocket each time the Nokia Tune begins to play.

Of course, now that phones can play proper music there are now more companies than ever trying to sell you new ringtones at exorbitant prices. Usually these new ringtones are branded as Trutones or Realtones, and sometimes it can be more expensive to have a ringtone sent to your phone than it is to buy and download a full track to your PC, which is a pretty ridiculous situation. Worse still, if you buy a new phone the ring tone that you bought for your old one may not be transferable to it, or may not be compatible with your more up-to-date handset.

Music companies aren’t all that bothered about compatibility issues as each time we buy a new ringtone royalties from the sale are filtered back to them to fill their coffers. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. With a little effort and the right tools you can quickly use your PC to convert existing music on CD or MP3 into a ringtone that you can then transfer to your phone. Be aware, however, that copying copyright-protected music is illegal if you don’t have permission.

What you’ll need
To get started you’ll need to get your hands on some editing software that can be used to trim your audio file to a suitable length and then save it as an MP3 file. One of the best tools for this type of job is a program called Audacity. It’s a free, open-source audio editor that can be downloaded here. To allow Audacity to save your file in the MP3 format you’ll also need the Lame MP3 codec. You can download this here.

Next you need some audio that you can turn into a ringtone. You can use either an MP3 file that you already have on your PC or rip a track from an audio CD. If you want to rip a track you can use Windows Media Player 11 for this purpose. Open Windows Media Player and click Tools, Options and then Rip Music. Choose WAV (Lossless) in the dropdown Format box under Rip Settings.

Unfortunately earlier versions of WMP can’t be used to rip your file from CD because they don’t support ripping to WAV format. However, you can always use iTunes instead. Just make sure you set the ripping option to WAV in the Advanced section of the Preferences menu.

Now you’ve got your audio file ready it’s time to load up Audacity. Once it has started, click on the File Menu and select Open. Choose your WAV or MP3 file and click OK.

You’ll now see the waveform for the audio file laid out in front of you running from left to right across the screen. Click on the Play button or hit the space bar to start listening to the track. You can quickly move to anywhere in the track by clicking on a location in the waveform and then double-tapping your space bar. To zoom in and out of the file select the Magnifying Glass icon and then click the left mouse button to zoom in and the right mouse button to zoom back out again. To return to editing mode select the icon that looks like a capital ‘I’.

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