HOW-TO : Create ringtones – From finding the music to setting it as your ringer
How-Tos April 13th, 2009I know there are a lot of people out there who want have wanted a certain piece of music as a ringtone for their phones but they just dont know how to get that. This blog post is for those people ! Well – you do know how to use the computer ! So here goes. I use this process all the time and have created some awesome ringtones ! My friends all ask me to make them a ringtone now !
STEP 1: The source
YOUTUBE + DownloadHelper plugin
YouTube has a ton of shit and it probably has exactly what you are looking for ! Be it a commercial that you liked that had a certain piece of music (you probably dont even know the name of the music at this point) or something that is in a movie ! You will find it in Youtube. So head over and find that piece !
Now, the next part – Downloading the video that has the music piece. You need to have Firefox for this step. If you already do then head over to http://www.downloadhelper.net/ and download and install the DownloadHelper add-on for firefox. Once you have done this, go back to YouTube and load the video you want. On the top left hand corner of the video you will notice a little 3 ball icon. Clicking on this will give you an option to download the video. Download it – It will be a file with the .flv as the extension which stands for Flash Video. Save the file to your computer. We will need this for the next step.
If you already have an MP3 that you want to start with to create the ringtone then you can skip directly to STEP 3.
STEP 2 : Extracting only the audio out of the video (.flv file)
SUPER
There are a lot of media converters out there and most of them know how to handle .flv files. I user a software called SUPER – It is a slightly heavyweight software but it seems to get the job done for me for most of the times. You can download super from http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html If you can’t seem to figure out how/where to download SUPER from this site then take a look at their help page at http://www.erightsoft.com/dlhelp.html. I think they have legality issues.
Once you download and install the software you can rip out the audio track from the .flv video that you downloaded and save it as an mp3. To do that, start SUPER and from the “Select the Output Container” dropdown list choose “mp3 (Audio Only)” option. Next drag the .flv file that you downloaded into SUPER into the area that says “DROP A VALID MULTIMEDIA FILE HERE”. Click on the “Encode” button and it should have your mp3 file ready with only the audio track from the video file. We will use this mp3 file for the next step .
There are a couple of websites that will get the Youtube video and rip out the music for you, but I find that the quality that they serve out is not all that great. If you still want to give that a try and escape this step and the trouble then here are a few links. I DO NOT recommend them at all !
STEP 3 : Editing the audio
AUDACITY
The iPhone and most other phones limit the time for a ringtone. The iPhone limits the ringtones up to 30 seconds. That means that you need to crop the mp3 file that you had to the 30 seconds that you would like the ringtone to be. To do this we need another piece of software called Audacity. You can download Audacity from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/. You also need to download an mpp3 encoder called LAME to be able to export your files to mp3. You can download LAME for Audacity from http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/Lame_v3.98.2_for_Audacity_on_Windows.exe
Once you have Audacity installed, you can point it to find where the LAME mp3 encoder is installed by going to Edit > Preferences. Go to the “File Formats” tab and under MP3 Export setup, click on the “Find Library” button and locate the LAME mp3 encoder file called lame_enc.dll. This file is in the directory where you installed LAME.
Ok – now you are all set to cut your 30 seconds of the ringtone. Open the mp3 file that we converted using SUPER in Audacity. Select the 30 seconds that you want as your ringtone. It should look like the screenshot below:
Copy it using Ctrl+c. Create a new file in Audacity (Ctrl+n) and paste the clip that you copied using Ctrl+v. Select the first second. It should look like the image below:
Now, we want a nice fade in effect to our ringtone so it feels more smooth 
To do this, with the above beginning of the song selected, go to Effect > Fade In and voila – you have a nice fade in effect to your ringtone. It should look like the image below:
Now, in a similiar fashion do a Fade out effect for the end of the song. Selec the last second of the song and go to Effect > Fade out. It should look like the image below:
Once this is done, you can save the ringtone as an mp3 by going to File > Export as MP3. If you can use an mp3 as a ringtone in your phone, then this is probably the end of the tutorial. Copy the mp3 that you just saved onto your phone and then set that as the ringtone from the settings. For most Motorola phones this works. try keeping the file size less than 300k. You can do this by playing around with the settings for the export of the MP3. If you are an iPhone user then move on to the next step…
STEP 4 : Converting to the iTunes ringtone format (.m4r)
The apple iPhone uses a proprietary format for ringtones called m4r. Actually it is just an mp4 file with the video disabled. This is a pain but I guess we all have to live with it. To conver the mp3 ringtone to a m4r ringone that is recognized as a ringtone in iTunes we need to use SUPER once again. Start up SUPER and drag the mp3 file over to convert it. Keep the conversion settings as shown below:
Encode the file. This will give you a .mp4 file. Rename file extension to .m4r you have an iPhone ringtone. I hope you made sure it is a 30 second or less clip, because the iPhone doesnt allow a file larger than that for a ringtone. Move on to the next step to put it on the phone.
STEP 5 : Putting it in the phone
ITUNES
Copy over the .m4r file that you created to your iTunes. It should show up in your iTunes under Ringtones. Once you see it there. Connect your iPhone and sync it. Make sure that the new ringtone is selected to be sync’d under the Ringtones tab in the device.
STEP 6 : Setting the ringtone in your iPhone
When the sync is done, check if the ringtone is there on the iPhone by going to Settings > Sounds > Ringtones on the iPhone. Select the new ringtone and you are done ! Enjoy the new ringtone that you didn’ have to pay a dime for !!
I NEVER buy ringtones and neither should you – its a ripoff businesss I feel and people make a ton of money out of that business cause there is no real product that they create – Its just a cut copy paste job !!
