How to Create and Upload a Ringtone
Ringtones are the most important part of personalizing your phone. You can use just about any media you can think of as a ringtone: a sound effect, a quote from a movie, part of your favorite song, or any other form of audio clip.
There's a sizable industry focused on producing ringtones, but if you are not able to find a ringtone that suits your desires, you can make your own from practically any media with ease.
Before creating and uploading your own ringtone, consider the following questions.
- Does your phone support user-created ringtones?
- What format does your ringtone need to be?
- Are you comfortable experimenting with software, to create a ringtone?
- What do you want your ringtone to be?
I. Audio Support
Make sure that you phone accepta ringtones made by someone other than the phone manufacturer. Older phones are usually restricted to the handful of ringtones that came installed on the phone, and have little room for expansion.
Those that do are required to download ringtones directly from the manufacturer, and are otherwise limited in their capability to include user made ringtones.
Most phones manufactured in the last five years, however, support a wide variety of formats of data and accept most common audio formats. Assess your cellphone's capabilities by either consulting your phone's manual, your phone manufacturer's website, or forums dedicated to your type of cellphone.
Usually, you'll be able to create and upload a ringtone as you see fit. Because ringtones are such a popular customization feature, they are an open and easily modified part of your phone's software.
II. Audio Formats
Most ringtones are in one of three common audio formats: .wav files, .mp3 files, or .aac files. The .wav file is a common audio file with along history, and is more common for phones supporting open standards. Phones running Palm's WebOS, Windows Mobile, or Android support these right out of the box.
When you create your ringtone, you need to make sure you're creating it in the proper audio format that your phone uses.
Plug your phone into your PC and browse its folders, to see what kind of file your phone requires. There should be a folder called either 'Sounds' or 'Ringtones' that contain all of the files your phone already has for use as ringtones. Look at the file extension of these audio files to assess whether your phone uses one of the above formats, or a different one.
Once you assess the format you need, research the tools necessary to create ringtones of that format.
III. Software Considerations
Because every phone is different, ringtones come in many formats, and must be made in many formats. If you are considering making your own ringtones, you're probably already considering a piece of audio media for use as a ringtone.
Is the format of this media the same as your phone's requirements?
If not, you need to re-encode it, to convert it to the new format. Use your favorite search engine to find a tool that enables you to convert the file directly, or use audio manipulation software that lets you save your manipulated file in the appropriate format for your phone.
For example, Audacity lets you work from an .mp3 file and save it as a .wav, without any intermediate steps.
Making a ringtone involves a small degree of research with your favorite search engine. You're looking for two primary tools. The first is a tool to extract the audio data you need from your media. This is unnecessary if you are working with a song or audio file, but a video requires separate software for removing the audio data from the multimedia track.
The second tool is the actual audio manipulation software. Free tools like "Audacity" are easily downloaded, but if you want to modify your ringtone in complex ways, purchase professional audio software. This is only necessary if you are creating brand new, complex audio files from scratch, or making remixes of existing audio. Free tools should be sufficient for most users.
IV. Selecting material
The fun part about making ringtones is selecting your source material.
- Are you taking samples from popular movies and extracting your favorite lines?
- Are you cutting the chorus out of your favorite song to use as a ringtone?
- Are you recording yourself or something around your home to use?
All of these options are possible for your ringtones.
Once you have selected your source, extract it if necessary, or record it if you are using original material. Edit your audio file for ringtone use, as you want a sound file that's only a few seconds long, and you may need to encode it at a lower frequency or sound quality in order to preserve space on your phone. The quality of your phone's speaker is low for audio playback, so reducing the quality of your ringtone lets you make only a small difference in the perceived quality of the audio.
Space is less of a concern, if you have a smartphone with large internal storage capacity. Still, you need to edit the audio file down to about 20 seconds. Your phone won't ring for long, and you want to use the most enjoyable segment of the audio for your ringtone. Otherwise you, never need to hear the portion you want from the ringtone.
V. Using your ringtone
Once you've edited the audio file to your liking, connect your phone to your PC and upload it to your phone's audio file storage directory. Then select the file from your system settings list, and use it as your ringtone. If you have storage space on a server elsewhere, or if it is an original work that you wish to upload to a ringtone sharing website, log on to that website and upload your file for other people to use on their phones.