| Media Copy Pro |
By James Preston
Ringtones are expensive - it's a hard fact to face. Unfortunately, when a cell phone starts to recite an 8-bit rendition of Mozart in a busy airport terminal, people begin to glare. Soon, the glares will turn into violence and poor cell phone users, stuck in the old days of expensive ringtone purchases, will be forced to drop money into the music or into hospital bills.
Humor aside, creating and transferring ringtones to cell phones has become much easier with the advent of ringtone creation software and transfer protocols like Bluetooth or direct USB connections. However, this article discusses a rather unique way of creating ringtones that is not only easy, but also free.
The freeware program Audacity is a very powerful audio editor. It is so powerful that small-time users will not likely need to purchase an audio editing program. However, an A/V degree is not necessary to learn the easy steps associated with opening an audio file, selecting the portion to be converted into a ringtone and cropping the portion from the rest of the file. The entire process is actually as easy and drag and drop, and the resulting file can be saved in many different containers from MP3 to WAV.
But what makes Audacity so great when it comes to ringtone creation is that external audio files can be used to create the tones. That means that a song from a personal music library can be edited down or a personal tone can be recorded and edited - all from the same program.
However, Audacity cannot create MIDI files which can eventually be turned into standard ringtones (recall the Mozart example). For phones which cannot handle MP3 ringtones, custom ringtone creation can start with an excellent program called Finale. While it is quite pricey, it allows users familiar with musical notes and composition to generate MIDIs based on their musical genius.
In conclusion, Audacity is hands-down the best ringtone creation software that this author is aware of. Its power, simplicity and the fact that its free all contribute to Audacity being an excellent ringtone generation software despite the fact that ringtone generation was never likely in its list of intended purposes!
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