How to Make Your Own Custom Ringtones for Your Cell Phone!

Are you tired of spending $1.99 or more to buy ringtones for your cell phone? Ringtones that you can't even customize? It's easy enough to create your own custom ringtones and send them to your cell phone for FREE with your own home computer -- all you need is an audio editing program and an mp3-creating program (which there are many free shareware and freeware programs available on the web.) and of course you need a cell phone that plays MP3 files, which most do these days. Here's how to make your own custom ringtones and get them on your cell phone... for FREE!

1) Edit a song into a ringtone: The first thing to do to make a ringtone for your cell phone is to create a 15-second snip of the song you want as the ringtone. This is easy to do with your basic audio editing programs. If you've got a favorite song on a store-bought CD you first rip the song from the CD and save it as a .wav file. Next, open up the .wav file in your audio editing program. I personally use Sound Forge to do my audio editing, it's a very cool program, but there are many shareware and freeware audio editing available on the web. The best of the free programs, in my opinion, is "Cooledit free" which is still available for free download on the web. Once you've opened the .wav file in your audio editing program, simply select a portion of the song you'd like as your ringtone. A 10-20 second snip works well enough for a ringtone, or you could even use the entire song, but it is a good idea to keep it short (10-20 seconds in length) for a nice small file size since most cell phones do not have a lot of storage space.

In my example (see picture one) I'm using Sound Forge to copy a 15-second snip of my own song "Superfreak Highway", and then I pasted it into a new file... After you've selected the portion of the song you want to make a ringtone out of, do a "copy" command to copy the selected audio, then "new" to create a new file, and then "paste" which will paste the copied audio portion into a new file. Now all you need to do is save the new file as a .wav file and close.

2) Convert the .wav to an mp3: The next step is to convert your ringtone .wav file into an mp3 file , which most cell phones can use as a ringtone. Again, there are many freeware mp3 programs available on the web. I personally use a freeware program called CDex which is a very handy CD ripper and also converts .wavs to mp3 files, and mp3 files to .wavs. For the purposes of the ringtone, you do NOT need a high-quality mp3 file, heck it doesn't even have to be stereo. In my own example (see picture 2, the CDex settings screenshot) I started with the default CDex mp3 conversion settings and just lowered the bitrate from 128 kpbs to 48 kbps which is pretty low-fi but good enough for a cell phone speaker (128 kbps is the norm for regular mp3s that you'd play on your stereo or mp3 player). With these settings in place I had CDex convert my 15-second "Superfreak Highway" .wav file to an mp3 file and the resulting mp3 file is only 89 kilabytes in size.... just the right size for a cell phone ringtone.

3) Transfer the mp3 file to your cell phone: Many cell phones these days have USB ports that allow you to transfer files between your computer and cell phone and all you need is the right USB cable and software (which sometimes are NOT included with the phone but sold separately) to transfer your custom ringtones to your phone's "sounds" folder. If you've got the USB cable but no software, you can try downloading a free program called "P2kCommander" which works with many cell phones and is easy to use for transfering files to and from your cell phone. If your cell phone has Bluetooth it is easy enough to transfer the ringtones to your phone, but your computer also has to have Bluetooth --which most desktop models do NOT, but you can get a Bluetooth USB dongle adapter (which are pretty cheap these days) for your PC. Lastly, if your cell phone has neither a USB port or bluetooth you can try emailing the ringtone to your phone as an attachment. Once you receive the meassage on your cell phone, just save the attached mp3 file in your 'sounds" folder. This works with many (but not all) cell phones but you will have to pay whatever multimedia download fee your service charges, but still that's pretty cheap if you keep the ringtone's file size small.