I have finally entered the 21st century, and not a moment too soon. Up to a few months ago I was content with my analog cell phone. Well, not with the service, but with the price. However, analog service is being phased out and in the meantime I am being charged an extra fee, so it made financial sense to upgrade. I am getting a Motorola Razr V3M as part of the Verizon package, and it allows me to download ringtones.
I’d really like to take one of my more obscure CDs (and therefore not downloadable from anyone), and record just part of it as a ringtone. I’m not looking for the whole song, just a few seconds of music. Is there any free/shareware/reasonable software that will allow me to do this (edit part of the song)? I am not interested in a home recording studio, so this can be very rudimentary in its abilities. It just has to be compatible with whatever a cell phone uses for music files. (Can you tell that I’m really not a phone type guy?)
My understanding is that I can email that file to my phone, and then install from there.
I went looking for this type of software recently, and for exactly the same reason.
I tried out a bunch of stuff, but most came down to “you can try this X times, then pay”. I have nothing against paying for downloaded software, but for what I was needing I figured there had to be some true freeware available.
I’ve used it to open mp3s and crop them down to 10-30 second snippets. You can cut / copy / paste parts of the music file, and apply some basic effects (like a fade out at the end). File size was an issue my first few attempts, but I discovered that I was exporting the mp3 at the highest sample rate. Dropping that down kept the snippets under the 500K (I think) limit for a ringtone on my phone. So now if my boss calls, my phone plays the “Imperial march” from Star Wars.
I use a USB data cable to copy the files from PC to phone (I got that since I bought a phone that doubles as an MP3 player), so I’m not sure about the “email to phone” steps. One thing to consider is that most plans (I think) have additional charges for data transfer above and beyond the normal monthly charge.
Audacity is a fantastic bit of software; if you want to export your projects as MP3, you need to tell it where to find the LAME encoder - which may already be installed somewhere on your system, particularly if you have CD ripping software installed. LAME isn’t distributed with Audacity, but can be downloaded freely.
