Xingtone Ringtone Maker
Easily make your own free ringtones
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Why pay $2 each for
ringtones from your wireless company when you can make your
own for free?
Can't find the
ringtones you want on your wireless company's ringtone list?
Here's a
simple and inexpensive way to create as many of your own ringtones
as you wish.
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These days few people are
content for their cell phone to make a traditional 'ring ring' type sound
when calls come in.
Not only does personal vanity
have a part to play in people wishing to add
customized ring tones to their phone, but so too does
practicality.
Imagine how confusing it would be if
everyone's phone made the same ringing noise - you'd never know
when your phone was ringing, compared to when it was someone
else's phone. Here's an easy way to add your own choice of
ringtone to your phone.
Xingtone Ringtone Maker
Xingtone's Ringtone Maker is
a simple little program that runs on both PCs and Macs, and
creates ringtones for over 120 different types of phone (ie most
recent models from most manufacturers), and works with all major
US and Canadian wireless services, including Cingular, T-mobile,
Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, Rogers, Cellular One and Fido.
It also works with over 130
models of European phones and with the main wireless services in
the UK and Germany.
Download the program, which
is available both in a free trial version and a $19.95 regular
version, choose your favorite piece of music that you have on
your computer, select which short part of the music you want to
make your ringtone, then send it to your phone.
It is almost literally as
easy and simple as that.
If you're not convinced,
try it and see.
Download the free trial which allows you to make up to ten ringtones from a single piece of music,
and sent to a single phone.
How it Works
The Xingtone program will
work with MP3, WMA or WAV files, or music directly from a CD.
It can be used with iTunes, although you need to first
export the iTunes track and import it as an MP3 file.
Various other uncommon types of digital music files are also
supported.
Needless to say, music with
'Digital Rights Management' (DRM) - a fancy way of saying 'copy
protection' built in to it can not be used. This would
include tunes purchased through Napster and Rhapsody.
The first part of making a
ringtone is simply choosing the piece of music, through the
usual sort of 'File - Open' interface. This is very
simple.
The program then imports the
sound file and displays its soundtrack on the bottom of the
program, as you can see here, with the two graph lines at the
bottom being the stereo sound file shown graphically - the more
blue, the louder the sound :
You next choose the part of
the sound file you want to use as your ringtone - you can click
your cursor anywhere on the music track to play that part, and
you can highlight parts of the soundtrack either to then zoom in
for finer selection, or to set the start and end points for the
ringtone you're creating.
Once you've chosen the
snippet of music you want to use as a ringtone, click the big
Send button in the bottom right, and within a few seconds,
you'll get a message on your cell phone, allowing you to
transfer the ringtone to your phone.
Follow the instructions on
how to load the ringtone into your phone by clicking the 'About
Your Phone' link in the Xingtone program, and before you know
it, your phone now has your new ringtone working.
Simple? Yes, it most
assuredly is.
Using the Software
Using the software was
almost as simple as promised.
It is probably a good thing
that the software is intuitive in use, because it is sorely
lacking in documentation, both within the program and on
Xingtone's website.
In particular, something as
simple as tooltips to appear when you hover the cursor over the
buttons on the lower left of the screen would be tremendously
helpful to explain what the buttons are for.
The ability to hear the
ringtone looping would also be helpful.
However, these comments are
minor quibbles, and in the context of a program that was
designed to be simple and easy for ordinary people to use,
perhaps even unfair.
If you do feel the need for
the fanciest of features, and want to use professional
grade music editing software to create your own ringtones, you
can do this with your choice of such programs, and then take the
final created .wav (or other format) file and process it through
Xingtone into the ringtone format and to have it conveniently
transmitted to your phone.
Free support is available
both through a Chat interface on Xingtone's website and also via
email. I found the Chat interface a very slow and not very
satisfactory way of seeking help, but the emails I sent on two
occasions were quickly answered, although not with consistently
sensible answers.
How to Make the Best Ringtone
Possible
The above information is all
you need to know to make an acceptably good ringtone.
But if you want to make the
ringtones as good as possible, there are several things you can
do to improve the quality of your ringtones. These extra
features in the software can be accessed if you change the
setting for the program from Easy to Advanced, causing ten new
buttons to appear at the bottom of the program.
First, start off with as
good a quality sound file as possible. Usually your highest
quality source of music is direct from a CD, so if you have a
choice of sources of the music you want to use, take it from the
CD rather than from any digital file you've already created.
Second, when you're choosing
the excerpt from the music to be your sound file, keep it short.
Although in theory you can make quite long ringtones, not all
phones support the theoretical maximum ringtone length. If
you get an error message when trying to download your ringtone,
it is probably due to the tone being too long.
A typical ring cycle on a
regular phone is about 5.5 seconds, so you don't need to go much
longer than 5 - 10 seconds in length to get a good short tune.
Shorter ringtones have
smaller file sizes, and while the ringtones are typically not
large files (25kB - 100kB in size) if your phone has only a
limited amount of storage, you may soon find yourself running
out of space. Another reason to make your ringtones
shorter rather than longer.
Third, when you're making a
ringtone, choose an excerpt with fairly high volume, and choose
an excerpt that starts off loud, rather than quiet. If you
choose an excerpt that starts quietly, you probably won't hear
it if you're in a noisy environment until the tone is much of
the way through and gets to a louder bit.
If the music is very quiet,
you can select the part that is too quiet and then click on the
up arrow to increase the volume.
If the music varies too much
from loud to quiet, you can click on the bar chart button to
normalize the volume and make the ringtone more equal in volume.
Fourth, when choosing where
to start and end your ringtone, think what it will sound like
when it repeats. The ringtone will finish playing then
immediately start playing at the beginning again. So don't
end or start halfway through a note.
A good way to improve the
quality of the loop restart is to have a very short fade-out at
the end of the tone and perhaps also a very short fade-in at the
beginning.
Fifth, and again remembering
you want a ringtone that will be clearly heard, even in a noisy
environment, choose a piece of music that has varying loudness
and pitch/sounds, using the same principle of having the music
draw attention to itself as does the siren in an emergency
vehicle.
Sixth, you're not limited
only to music. If you want to become very creative, you
can create ringtones from your own recordings - whether it be
your own voice saying 'Wake Up. Sleepyhead' to be used as a
ringtone for your phone's alarm, or perhaps your partner's voice
saying 'Hi, honey, I want to speak to you' as a customized
ringtone for when their phone number calls you, or any other
humorous or sensible application you might think of.
Making multiple tones
Many phones allow for
different ring tones to be used depending on what type of event
is occurring - a different tone for a text message than for a
phone call, for example. Some phones allow you to
customize just about every sound the phone makes, including
alarms, and may also allow you to assign individual ring tones
to individual callers.
Obviously, in such cases,
you have a great deal of opportunity to create a wide range of
different ring tones for all the different situations when your
phone can make a sound.
Trial and Success
The best thing to do is to
simply go ahead and play with the program, and make some test
ringtone samples and vary the settings until you get it working
satisfactorily for you.
One feature of the software
I really liked was the 'instant gratification'. To choose
a piece of music, edit the ringtone, send it to the phone, and
have everything completed and the new ringtone working can be
done in no more than a minute, and usually in less than two or
three minutes (depending on how finicky you want to get with
editing your ringtone before sending it).
This definitely does
encourage experimentation.
Pricing
The Xingtone Ringtone Maker
costs $19.95, and this gives you the ability to create and send
unlimited ringtones to your phone number (but not to any other
phone numbers).
Xingtone don't charge you
any extra for each ringtone you create. But it is possible
your wireless company may charge you for the text messages and
ringtone data transfer to your phone - while these costs (if
applicable) are not likely to be substantial, they may represent
as a small incremental cost per ringtone received.
A Bonus for People with GSM
Phones
When you buy the software,
it is restricted to sending tones to one only phone number.
If you want to send tones to a second or more phone numbers, you
need to buy extra licenses to do that.
However, if you have two GSM
phones, you could simply put your SIM into the second phone,
reconfigure the software for the new phone type, and send the
tone to the other phone (which would of course now have your
Xingtone registered phone number).
Then, after downloading the
ringtone to that phone, you could then return the SIM to your
other phone.
Summary
Adding a ringtone to one's
phone has become very popular, and some people choose to
regularly change their ringtones too.
While there are plenty of
companies that will sell you ringtones, why buy the ringtones,
one by one, and why limit yourself to their selections, when for
a nickel less than $20, you can get a simple program allowing
you to make as many ringtones as you wish, from any type of
music or sound effect source - you can even record your own
voice and use it to the ringtone.
Xingtone's Ringtone Maker is
a simple program and fun to use. Recommended.
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Originally published
17 Feb 2006, last update
21 Jul 2020
You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer.
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