8.27.2008

What's that sound?

It's the sound of custom-made ringtones, free of charge, bellowing from the tiny lo-fi speakers of my iPhone. In the words of Don Moen, "God will make a way where there seems to be no way." 

How was it accomplished? I'll tell you. Like I said before, the iTunes ringtone creator only allows you to use songs you buy, and only if those songs are approved by the record labels. Well, a "ringtone" is actually just a short AAC (.m4p) file with a different extension: .m4r. So, what I did was take an mp3 from any album that I've imported, for instance, "Viva La Vida" by Coldplay. I dragged that file into Garage Band and made a nifty little 30 second clip of it with a short fade in and fade out so it's not too abrupt when it plays on my phone. I don't like for ringtones to scare me when they start. After that, I used the "export to iTunes" option on Garage band, which imported the mp3 into iTunes. Then, I set the importing options on iTunes to AAC, which creates an .m4p file. Once it was converted, I dragged the file to my desktop and erased it from the iTunes library. Once on the desktop, I just renamed the file from .m4p to .m4r, and double-clicked it. It opened up and automatically was put into the ringtone folder, which syncs with my phone. Dollar saved. 

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