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Make high quality iPhone ringers w/ Windows Movie Maker (including a silent ringer).
I started playing around with ringtones on the 1.1.2 firmware update and iTunes ver 7.5 today.
I was using Ringhero and the results were fairly abysmal. Apparently the output of the program is limited to Mono 48kbps….the ringtones on the iPhone sounded about as good as a recording of an police stakeout.
I started looking for alternatives when it dawned on me that Windows Movie maker could edit audio (you could use audio editing software including those on the Mac OS). It is also kind of nice that WMA is automatically converted to AAC upon import into iTunes which saves you a few steps in creating a ringtone for the iPhone if you preset the quality of your AAC file imports to at least 128kbps you are good to go (on a side note, it looks like most of my ringtones are about 128, so anything more would be overkill and waste space). Although the ones I used in 256 did play…..
All you need to do is import your audio file into Windows Movie Maker , and edit it (for duration along with and to select the portion of the file that you would like to use as a ringer). Make sure that you drag your clip to the beginning of the timeline in Windows Movie Maker before exporting it. When you export you can select the quality of your export I just went with the default; I also created a folder named "ringertemps" to export these files to just to keep them organized.
Making a ringtone for your iPhone is fairly straight forward and is covered at a number of sites. But I will cover the steps here for continuity’s sake.
To make your WMA clip into a ringtone just drag the clip into iTunes. It will be converted to an AAC file with the same name. The actual file will be placed in a folder named “Unknown Artist” in your iTunes music folder. You can just right click the file and select “Show in Windows Explorer.”
Once you have the folder open containing the file delete the file from your library but do not sent the actual file to the recycle bin. Now all you need to do is right click the file and rename the file extension to .m4r (you will need to change your windows settings to show file extensions if you have not already done so).
Now drag and drop that file into your “Ringtones” folder in the iTunes Music folder and double click it. The file will automatically populate in your list of selectable ringtones in iTunes.
You can also create a silent ringtone to assign to those contacts that your prefer sending to vm by default (like Wonder who is always dissing me when I call anyway). This way your phone stays mute, leaving you in ignorant bliss…”What you called? That’s strange, I didn’t hear anything. I had no idea…..damn phone.”
To do this just import any audio file into Windows Movie Maker and cut out the 1st 22 seconds of the song (or whatever duration you have your ring-time default set to), next cut out the tail end of the song leaving just a blip of audio. Convert that file and follow the same procedure as above. The sweet sound of silence and plausible denial.
Last edited by Rhino Chaser : 11-17-2007 at 12:36 AM.
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Good stuff. I didn't even think of windows movie maker as an option for editing files. I imagine this would work just as well for making ringtones for phones that will accept WMA or mp3 (like smartphones, etc.). Do you know if the movie maker will export in mp3? Or would some sort of plugin be necessary?
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