Custom ring tones from a Mac

One of the greatest reasons for having a bluetooth enabled phone is that you can put your own ring-tones on your phone. My old Sony-Ericsson T616 could play midi files so I was able to trim midi files down to short loops that sounded decent on the phone.

My Motorola RAZR plays midi files, but it can also play mp3s, which opens up a whole new world of potential. Now, instead of settling for whatever crap I could find on the Internet and removing any vocals or bad instruments, I can use bits of real songs from my own collection.

Accomplishing this is not as easy as I thought it would be. Trimming the Mp3’s is simple enough with shareware like Mp3 Trimmer. The first batch I made had been encoded at really high bit rates so 10 second clips were huge, and didn’t play on the phone. So after a few beers Saturday night I sat down, trimmed some tracks, and re-encoded them with iTunes into 56kbps, fixed bit rate, joint stereo files. This worked, and several sound great. Even some of the vocals are great, though I’ve decided not to use the sample from Gimme Some More for decency’s sake.

Any other advice? Yes – For some reason Motorola crippled the Bluetooth functionality on this phone with Windows, so you have to buy additional software to upload files to the phone, or sync your calendar. Uploading via Bluetooth Exchange on the Mac is cake though. So, do yourself a favor…

Also – choice of music is important. And not just because people will judge you by what gets played, or by the fact that you have a song playing when your phone rings. You want to get a small segment that sounds good when it loops, or pick something long enough that you’ll answer it before it loops. Also, space is a premium, so keep things short.