Michael's Mac - How to Make a Ringtone that Kicks

Custom ringtones are great. I know when my wife calls because the phone plays the Wedding March (Here comes the bride...). This might seem silly at first, but when I'm in a situation when I normally wouldn't take a call, the Wedding March lets everyone know who's on the other end of the line, and therefore it's a call I must take in order to preserve matrimonial bliss.

While many songs might make great ringtones, they're often so quiet that you may miss a call. This tutorial will show you how to use the free audio editing program, Audacity, to take any song and make it a nice loud ringtone.

In this example, I'm using images from the Beach Boy's song, "Had to Phone Ya".

Start by downloading Audacity. I used the most recent beta which worked fine. After opening your song in the audio editor, you should see a window similar to he one below.

(Click any preview for a full sized images in a new window)

I'm going to use this song from the very beginning, so the first thing I like to do is trim any dead space off the front so it starts playing immediately.

Zoom in to the front of the song by repeatedly hitting Command-1. (Command-3 zooms out). Click and drag the cursor across the dead space and hit the DELETE key to remove it.

For this Beach Boy's song, I want to loop the first few measures of the song. This is sort of extra credit, so if you don't feel comfortable editing, just skip down to the next section.

I want to use only the lyric, "I had to phone ya, had to phone ya just to talk to you...". In Audacity, I'll drag the cursor from one piano downbeat to the next one after the lyric. This will give me a nice clean loop. Then copy it to the clipboard.

Open a New document (Command-N) and paste the section you want to loop.

To paste repeated copies, hit the Skip to End transport button, and paste several copies until you have at least 30 seconds of audio.

Next step:

All phones have small speakers with a very limited ability to reproduce a wide range of frequencies. To make the most out of the volume available, we're going to get rid of all the low frequencies in the song. This is the first step in making an otherwise lackluster ringtone really pop.

In Audacity, select all of your audio (Command-A) and from the Effect menu, select Equalization. Pull all the sliders below 400 Hz down so they match the preview below. When finished, hit the OK button.

Next, from the Effects menu, select Compressor. Move the Threshold slider until it reads -30db. Make sure the box is checked next to: Normalize to 0db after compressing. When finished, hit the OK button.

Compared to when we started, you should now be able to see that the waveform of your song is bigger, and therefore louder!

All that's left to do is export your new ringtone!. From the File menu select Export. Most phones can play MP3 files (check your manual), so for this example, let's select that option.

If this is the first time you have used Audacity, it may ask you to locate the MP3 encoding library file. It usually provides the location for you, but just incase it doesn't, the file you want to select is in the Audacity plugin folder: libmp3lame.dylib

Copy your new ringtone to the phone and give it a listen!

Questions? Send me an email.