Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Make Your Own Ringtone–without iTunes

Apple’s new version of iTunes includes software for making ringtones. But there are other ways to do it.
September 6, 2007

At Apple’s press event yesterday, Steve Jobs, the company’s CEO, announced a number of new gadgets, including a tiny video iPod and a touch-screen iPod with Wi-Fi capabilities. But a newly announced iTunes feature caught my eye: the make-your-own ringtone function. Apple has not only made it easy to buy music online; it has also made it easy for a user to create a short snippet of that song to play on her phone–a ringtone–and buy it from Apple.

The idea of making it simple for people to create their own ringtones is obviously a good one, and to charge for it is smart. After all, ringtones are usually downloaded for more than $2 each, while Apple’s ringtone costs $0.99 to $1.98 for the song and $0.99 to convert it into a ringtone file. But it’s still hard to shake the feeling that by making a ringtone with iTunes, you’re paying again for a song that you’ve already bought. (For a comical take on this idea, here’s an article from the Onion.)

A few months ago, I got frustrated with the measly ringtone selection on my phone, and I was not in the mood to pay for other options, so I decided to make my own. It’s not that hard, actually. First, I picked out a couple of songs from my iTunes collection that I thought would make good ringtones, and then I made sure that they didn’t have any DRM (digital rights management) software on them. The songs that I ripped from CDs were free of DRM, but songs that I bought from iTunes needed to be burned to a CD and then ripped back to iTunes in order to make them clean. Then I imported the music files, one at a time, to Audacity–free audio-editing software–where I cut out snippets. I didn’t try to compress the files, and they came out at a couple of hundred kilobytes, which is quite large for a ringtone and actually might not work for many phones with limited memory (MP3 compression software is available online, and it can shrink the files much smaller). To transfer the files to my phone, I used the Bluetooth connection from my Macbook Pro and Motorola Rokr. Then, under my phone’s settings, I selected the music file I had just transferred as the ringtone.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.