Brief Guide to Creating Your Own Ringtones
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The total number of mobile phone subscribers in the world has exceeded 3.3 billion, or more than 50% of the world’s population. In most European countries the penetration rate is 130-150 percent, or more phones than people. So it is especially important to have a ringtone that is personal, one that defines you—a custom ringtone. In this guide, you’ll find out how to create one.
I think it is quite pointless to explain what a ringtone is. However, if some of you were living under a rock or aren’t familiar with this exact American term then here it goes. The definition of ringtone is misleading since it isn’t a tone at all. In the world of mobile phones, we call a ringtone the ringing sound that is generated each time the phone rings. Users almost always have the ability to customize this sound.
Moving on, I know that you are either frowning in disbelief or puzzled as to how I am planning to guide you through the process of creating a ringtone; well, in short, this won’t be an artistic music-targeted article. Instead, we are going to focus on the technical parts of splitting, extracting, and transcoding, if need be, from music tracks or basically any sort of audio sounds/tracks, regardless of source or content.
In this article we will first present a few freeware software applications that sport the necessary features and functions for us. We need audio editing and perhaps mixing functions. Transcoding is optional (but sometimes helps); the same goes for additional effects (DSP, volume normalizer, echo, reverb, etc.). Then moving further we will explain the basic tasks that we need to do in order to create a ringtone.
Needless to say, keep in mind that this is an educational article. Its major purpose is to teach you the techniques that lie behind this kind of computer task, and nothing more. We do not condone piracy, nor do we suggest that you should record your music tracks from the CDs that you own, because that too is a violation of the copyright laws and DRM, according to RIAA [link]. You should know what you are doing.
Therefore, our article focuses on the task of how to create your own ringtones from longer audio files. As a result, we will explain and show a few variations on how you can take an audio file, check which part you like, and then split it from there, perhaps double the selected part, and ultimately create your 20-30 seconds long ringtone. It is all up to you what you consider audio files.
Knowing all of this, let’s begin.
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