I say, iPhone users and their ability to use any song in iTunes as a ringtone have been getting a bit self-rightous lately (i kid, i kid). Actually most modern mobile phones are capable of using mp3 files as a ringtone, it’s more often than not an issue of whether or not your service provider will let you. The problem with using purchased music off of iTunes is that they are not using the mp3 format.
I recently purchased the Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog soundtrack from iTunes. Of course the majority of the music is copy protected, preventing me from playing it on anything other than my iPod or iTunes. That being the case a ringtone from of one of the tracks is out of the question. Or is it?
You’ll need to download and install an application called Audacity. It a powerful, free, and open source application for editing audio files. In addition to the application itself, you will need to download the mp3 plug-in that is available for it. Once you’ve downloaded them, extract both files and install the Audacity application. Don’t do anything with the extracted files from the mp3 plug-in, we’ll get to that.
One of the nice features about Audacity, and the one we’ll be using to make our ringtone, is the ability to record anything sent out over the computers speakers.
Though the other tutorials I’ve provided so far are not necessarily limited to a Windows based platform, this one will point more specifically towards XP. There are a couple of very simple reasons for this. First, the point of this project is essentially to take a iTunes AAC song and convert it to MP3, making Linux a much more complicated option. Second, I’m not really using a Macintosh, because no matter how much I like using them, I can’t afford one at the moment. So because of those reasons I’m doing this on a Windows XP machine. And there are just a couple of Windows-specific settings I need to double check to make sure it records properly.
My microphone input was by default set to a web cam I had installed. Unless you have a similar web cam installed, it will most likely be set to your sound device like my NVIDIA Audio chipset.
Double check to make sure the SPDIF, Master Volume, and Wave are unchecked. Other than that, the rest of this tutorial should be more or less universal.
Go ahead an open Audacity, your basic screen should look like screen-shot below. See the pull down menu on the tool bar right above the time-line? You want to that to be set to “Stereo Mix” or sometimes “Wave Out”. This is what all audio from your operating system will be sent through. You’ll also want to lower the input and output levels right next to the drop-down menu. If you leave them at full, the recording is going to clip and will sound poor. I lowered mine to about half and it works well for me.
Next, make sure iTunes is open, and the song you want to record is selected.
Start recording on Audacity by clicking the red circle button, just like on any tape recorder made in the past 30 years. Then go ahead and press play on iTunes to start dubbing the music. No need to rush and try to make it instantaneous, we’ll be cutting out any silence from the track. In Audacity, you should start seeing red bars jump and the graphical sound wave start to fill in.
Once iTunes has finished the song, go ahead and press stop (the yellow square) in Audacity. You’ll have the whole recording, dead air and all, represented in what looks like a big blue scribble.
The flat blue line in the beginning and the end of the waveform is just silence. There is a few seconds of it and we want to cut that out of the ringtone. Otherwise your phone will just sit in silence when the ringer goes off. Click the mouse at one end of the line segment. Then trace it across to just before the wave-form beings. The dead air selected in a darker gray.
Hit the delete key to remove the silence permanently. Then edit out the silence at the end of the track just as you did for the beginning. In this example I selected a very short song, only about 30 seconds. This happens to be the perfect length for a ringtone. Obviously most songs are longer. You can also use this editing technique to shorten the song by just selecting the portion you want as your rintone, like a chorus. You can play the track over and over and watch where the cursor is positioned when the portion of the song you want to use starts and stops. Select and delete everything else just like you did with the silent portions. If you get clever and want to experiment with Audacity a little bit, you can even make the track fade in and out to make the cuts seem less abrupt. When edited, your new waveform should look mostly like blue squiggle.
Now to save the track as an MP3, go to the “File” menu and select “Export A MP3…”. If this is your first time using Audacity, it will ask you for the location of the MP3 plug-in. If you downloaded it from the link above, browse in the window provided to the files for the mp3 plug-in and select the lame_enc.dll. Click OK. Next you’ll be able to save your track like you would any new file. Once you enter in a file name and hit Save, you’ll get a dialog box asking for some information about the song. Go ahead and fill it in as best you can with the song title, album, etc… Then click OK.
At this point you can exit out of both Audacity and iTunes. You’ve saved your ringtone as an mp3 file and are ready to transfer it to your phone. If your phone lets you add an MP3 as a ringtone, good for you. In fact hold onto that phone with your kung fu grip because most cell providers don’t let you do that. Often we have to be a little more creative getting the ringtone on the phone. My Palm Centro has web browsing capabilities, and being that I run my own blog, I exploit that ability on my phone to load the MP3 onto my phone. First I have to upload my file to my website. If you’ve read my previous post on “How to Setup WordPress”, then some of this will be familiar. Now I could us an FTP client like I did for the WordPress install, but since it’s just a single file, I’ll use my webserver’s control panel interface. Go to your control panel interface and select the file manager.
Once it’s loaded, you’ll get a listing of the files and directories on your webserver. Select the folder that is labled “public_html” or “www” as this is what is accessible by the outside world.
Click the icon labeled “Upload” in the upper toolbar. This will take you to a new screen.
By clicking the browse button, it will open a standard window for browsing files. Find and select the MP3 we just created. When you hit OK the interface will automatically start uploading the file.
Go ahead and close everything out because we are now going to turn our attention to the phone. If you don’t have a Palm Centro, I don’t know how useful this will be to you. I would think it would work pretty well for any phone that has a built in web-browser. However I would appreciate any feedback regarding other phones.
In this case, I’ll want to load my web-browser on my phone, and all I really have to do is enter a web-address: http://mentalreboot.com/Dr%20Horrible%20Intro.mp3
“Mentalreboot.com” is of course this site, for which I used the web space to upload the MP3. “Dr%20Horrible%20Intro.mp3” is the file I uploaded. A “%20” is entered in place of spaces because a web address can’t have blank characters. The “%20” tells the web browser to look for a file with spaces in these spots. So “Dr Horrible Intro” becomes “Dr%20Horrible%20Intro”. It may be a bit confusing, but it is just how the web happens to work.
Once I enter the link, my phone asks me where I’d like to store the file. I select the appropriate option to copy it as a ringtone.
It proceeds to download the mp3, then gives me a chance to rename the file before it is saved with the other ringtones.
Once I hit “OK”, the phone confirms that the ringtone has been saved. Now it is available to me in my selection of rings in my phone preferences. That’s about all there is to it.
There may be other methods to load the mp3. I’ve traded many ringtones with other phone models through the use of bluetooh, and sometimes you can text them to yourself using email. This all depends on the models of phones involved and their carries. So your mileage is going to vary. Technically speaking, you are going to get slight degradation in the quality of the audio when converting from the AAC file to the MP3. This won’t be noticeable by most ears. And besides, we are just making a ringtone here, it doesn’t have to be a perfect recording.
