Smart phone and related technologies have significantly increased over the past few years world-wide. From the poorest to the richest countries, the cost and penetration of mobile technology has resulted in cell phone usage dramatically increasing across all social-economic boundaries. One of the commonalities across the various models of cell phones is the ability to use tailored ringtones for a mobile phone. In order to obtain new ringtones for a phone, however, consumers find that many cell phone service provides will charge a fee for ringtone downloads or require one to subscribe to a mailing list in exchange for free ringtones. As a result, a common task that arises for mobile users is making ringtones for their phone from music that is already purchased without spending additional money to do so.

Make Ringtones with Open Source Software

A popular, open source application used to make ringtones is the Audacity application available for free from Sourceforge. Audacity supports multiple platforms and lets you edit MP3 files down to a 20 second clip that can be uploaded to your phone as a ringtone.

Step 1 – Download and install the Audacity application from the URL provided at the bottom of this article. Note that older builds of Audacity would require you to download the LAME compression library which is not required with the current build of the application.

Step 2 – Save a copy of the MP3 file that you are going to create a ringtone from on your computer in a different folder than it is currently stored.

Step 3 – Open the Audacity application and open the copy of the MP3 file by selecting the “File” and “Open” menu buttons.

Step 4 – Use the “Select” tool to highlight the 20 seconds of the MP3 that you want to make into a ringtone. You may need to use the “Zoom” feature to locate the specific part of the song.

Step 5 – Select the “Edit” and “Trim” menu buttons from the application’s file menu.

Step 6 – Choose the “Export as MP3” menu option and save the file to your computer.

Step 7 – Transfer the ringtone to your mobile phone through USB, Bluetooth, or email depending on your preferred means of data transfer.

Making Ringtones with iTunes

Some iPhone and iTunes users, however, would rather create ringtones with music in their iTunes library even though Apple will charge you money for doing so. If you want to try this option, Apple recommend taking the following steps from within iTunes:

Step 1 – Open iTunes on your computer.

Step 2 – Select the “Edit” and “Preferences” menu options.

Step 3 – Select the “General” menu tab and click the checkbox next to the “Ringtones” menu option if it is not already selected.

Step 4 – Select the song in your iTunes library that you want to use for generating a ringtone.

Step 5 – Select the “Store” and “Create Ringtone” menu options.

Step 6 – Select the parts of the song to make into the ringtone with the subsequent editor that appears for a total length of 30 seconds.

Step 7 – Choose the “Buy” menu button. After you have paid for the ringtone, iTunes will let you change the song name and other details but not the part of the song that has been used to create the ringtone.

Audacity Open Source Ringtone Software:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/