Ringtones Agogo: Ringtone Podcasts and ToneShop
by Eric March on March 24, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Having recently acquired an iPhone, I’ve naturally been on the hunt for all of the Darwin apps and other things that I ignored when I had only a Touch, since now they’re of significantly greater interest to me — and as a nice benefit, I can blog about them more authoritatively. I was pleasantly surprised then to discover a couple of new things floating around, both on the same day, as it turns out.
Kicking things off was the discovery of ToneShop for Windows. While this free program is nothing new, its most recent version now supports the creation and conversion of audio files to iPhone M4R ringtone format. (Which is really the same as the regular M4A AAC format used by iTunes, just with a different file extension.) It features totally basic editing by letting you choose the start and end times of your ringtone from a full song or other audio file. This isn’t quite that accurate because it only lets you winnow the slider down to the nearest second; it would be nice if it supported times down to 1/100th of a second, editable in a text box — maybe in a future version. However, if you already have an audio editor, you can simply extract the snippet you want, save it as a WAV, and then just use ToneShop to do the automatic conversion for you. Then all you need to do is drag it into iTunes and away you go; no need to load into iTunes, convert to AAC, move from iTunes folder, rename to M4R, then re-import to iTunes. ToneShop is free to use and available from the link above.
Along the same lines, iPhone hacktress extraordinaire Erica Sadun stumbled across the Teen Buzz blog, who have discovered an innovative way to distribute free ringtones — as a podcast right through iTunes! The podcasts are actually distributed in M4R format, so subscribing to and subsequently downloading the podcasts automatically shunt new ringtones right into your Ringtones category in iTunes. Teen Buzz’s podcast mainly include variants of the “mosquito” ringtone, which is a 17KHz or greater tone that supposedly only younger folks can hear. (I can barely hear 17KHz myself, and forget anything above that. My lawn. Get off of it.) However, as Erica points out, as a proof-of-concept, this is a very workable means of distributing free ringtones right through iTunes itself, so it’s highly probable that we might start to see more of the same concept turn up for proper ringtones.
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Posted in iPhone Related
March 24th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
hey sorry i didn’nt understand i got a question mmm can i convert a full song into a full ringtone?
March 25th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Yeah, you can do a full song if you want. You only need to use the time sliders if you want to use only a portion of a full song.