How to: Creating your own ringtones

Many people online are asking where they can download free ringtones for their mobile phones. Mobile providers are usually charging ringtones and they are getting more and more expensive every day. Did you know that you can make your own ringtones on your mac very easily using the software that is free? In this article I’m going to show you how to do it in a few easy steps.

Software you will need: iTunes (It already comes as a part of iLife app. just check if you have newest version installed- 7.0.1) Audacity (Free open-source audio editor and recorder) iTunes -LAME encoder (The iTunes-LAME Encoder combines the simple interface of iTunes with the high quality of the LAME encoder)

Step 1: Preparing a song: Now when you have all the software that you will need, you are ready to start preparing your music. You can either rip your song (s) from an audio CD using iTunes or you can use an mp3 song that you already have on your computer. If you are ripping songs from your CD’s, I’d recommend you to do it with iTunes Lame encoder rather then using just iTunes app. Your ringtone does not have to be in a full MP3 quality so you can lower the bit-rate to 48Kbps when encoding. If you already have an mp3 song in your iTunes music library, make a copy of the song and re-encode it.

Step 2: Additional Tweaking: When you have prepared your song to be used as a ringtone, you can now use Audacity software to “fine tune” it. In Audacity you can trim the parts of a song that you want to use ( if you don’t want to use a whole song), or you can add echo and other cool effects to your ringtone.

Step 3: Sending ringtones to your phone: Now when you have made your ringtone and if you are happy with how does it sound, you will need to upload it to your mobile phone. Depends on your mobile phone model, you can do it either using Bluetooth or DCC (Direct Cable Connection). For more information’s about your phone features, visit the website of your mobile phone maker.

What if my phone does not support MP3 format?: In that case, you’d need some ringtone converters which enable you to converting your rintones into various formats ( polyphonic - midi ) that are supported by your phone. “Coding Workshop Ringtone Converter” is a good one. ($US 18,95).

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Google Ramblings

Ok, it’s official now, Google has acquired Jaiku! If you don’t know, Jaiku is mini-blog social networking platform especially suitable to use with mobile phone devices. Unlike Twitter and recently Pownce, Jaiku was never gained much popularity among users for some reason. Now, that Google owns the platform, things are about to change. Google already owns some popular web services: YouTube,Blogger,Gmail, Google Earth, Google maps and many more smaller services within google.com portal. Another rumour that has been spreading on the Internet is that google is about to make it’s own version of a mobile phone device called “gPhone” It is very likely that gPhone is going to be similar to apple’s iPhone and it will use same touch-sensitive technology iPhone uses. Here is what, in my opinion, could make gPhone the best mobile phone device ever:

Operating system: iPhone uses OS X as a platform which makes it unique to other mobile devices on the market. gPhone thus has to find as unique platform to use, so it can compete with the iPhone. Developing a new operating system for a mobile device can be rather expensive and risky. Google needs to adopt already developed solution. So guys, do you remember BeOS? It was a great operating system but lack of software and hardware support forced developers to shut down the original project. BeOS variations still exist, (see Zeta OS) but they can not be considered a serious OS for a PC again because of lack of software and hardware support. I think it would be great for Google to acquire say Zeta OS and modify it to make a brand new mobile platform that would be used with gPhone. BeOS is very similar to OS X. It’s powerful and it has friendly GUI. I remember back in 1998 when I first tried the original BeOS, I was really impressed. It had great graphic and networking performances combined with an intuitive interface that looks like NEXT.

Application support: Google does not have to be worried about application support as they already own vast variety of services that all can be used on gPhone too. iPhone for instance already uses YouTube. Gmail is the most popular web based e-mail service and it’s very reliable and most important, it’s free! With a few modifications made, (IMAP support) gmail could seamlessly work with gPhone. It would be integrated into the OS just like .Mac service is seamlessly working with OS X. Putting together Blogger and Jaiku would be great, and I don’t need to mention Google Earth and Google maps as we all know what kind of potential they have.

Hardware tweaking: Google has had enough time to see how competitors (LG-Prada and Apple) are going with their products. Now, if they are smart enough, they can correct all mistakes made by LG and Apple hardware-wise. I hope they will be able to do the job right.

What now you are asking yourself? What’s missing? I think the missing link is that Google does not have an online music store. Both Apple and Yahoo have one. It would be great if Google could offer a wi-fi music store. I am really looking forward to seeing if Google is up to the challenge of developing a mobile phone device. Good luck!!