How to make your own ringtones

If you’re like me, the idea of making your own ringtone seems like a cool way to make your phone a little more fun. It’s great that mobile phones come loaded with so many different ringtones built-in, but who wants to go with the canned sounds when you can hear “This is radio clash…” (one of my favorite ringtones).

There are a couple of different ways you can go about making your own ringtone. For starters, you can buy and download a ringtone from your mobile service provider. This is definitely an easy way to do it, however, it does cost anywhere from $1-2 each plus air time charges.

Another option is to use an application like Xingtone. Xingtone makes it super easy to edit your favorite song to a nice clip and automatically transfers it to your phone. The software costs about $20 and you will incur a data charge from your service provider since the ringtone is sent via your carrier.

The third option is do to it yourself by transferring the song to your phone over a Bluetooth or USB connection. This is the cheapest option and gives you the most flexibility.

Tips for making your own ringtone

1. Pick a song that’s appropriate. If your phone rings while you’re in a meeting with the VP of Marketing, you don’t want to be embarrassed by a ringtone that’s trashy.
2. If you’re creating your ringtone from a CD (or transcoding from an existing file), copy the track to a different folder than the rest of your mp3s so the ringtones don’t get mixed up with your music library.
3. Once you have a song picked out, edit it down to a short clip. Using a full-length song will take up a lot of space on your phone. And, most likely, you’ll never hear the entire song because you’ll answer the call right away. The ideal ringtone clip is approximately 10-20 seconds in length.

Of all the ways to make your own ringtone, Xingtone is my favorite because it’s just so easy to use. However, I’m a Verizon customer and Verizon has put a cap (sound familiar? They do this a lot!) on the size of the ringtone allowed by Xingtone, which means they can only support a ringtone of about 5 seconds. If you can come up with a cool and catchy ringtone that’s less than 5 seconds in length, I want to hear about it.

So since I’m an unhappy Verizon customer and I can’t use Xingtone to its fullest ability, I use the USB option to send ringtones to my Treo. It’s not easy, but it works. And now when my phone rings and I hear “Communication Breakdown” by Led Zeppelin, I always smile, even if it’s my boss who’s calling.