MP3 Ringtones

[InAppleHeaven]

I just purchased a motorola v551 cell phone from cingular. It has bluetooth, and the capability to play an mp3 as a ringtone. However, if I put an mp3 on there, it takes up a lot of space. There is only a 64meg media card installed, and ive been told its the biggest one I can get. Is there a way to edit an mp3 in order to just play like a 20 second clip of the song? That way, I could have several mp3 clips to use as ringtones. Anyone experimented with doing this?? P.S. Anyone checked out the new IPod Shuffle?

[AliensAreFuzzy]

There is a program I had on an old PC, MP3 Direct Cut, It was a simple program that you could use to clip MP3s. I'll quick look around for it

Edit: Found it. If you have a PC...MP3 Direct Cut

[mox358]

Lucky for you I researched this exact situation extensivly when I got my Cingular v551. And I will now share with you my solution

Cacophony 1.3.1

It's a lightweight MP3 editor. Drop in your MP3, trim the part you want, and resave it. Then copy it over! That simple...

Linky - Cacophony

[Applespider]

It's also worthwhile when you save your shortened MP3 to cut the quality of it. You really don't need a 192bit stereo ringtone since your phone has only one speaker. Take it right down to the bare minimum and convert it to mono - it will cut the size dramatically and allow you to fit more on.

I used to use Audacity to do this when I had a PC. I assume Audacity for the Mac would do a similar job.

PS Another fun thing to do is to create Garageband ringtones. I'm not musical enough to create full blown symphonies but a 30 second ringtone is within my capabilities!

[Veldek]

Originally Posted by Applespider

PS Another fun thing to do is to create Garageband ringtones. I'm not musical enough to create full blown symphonies but a 30 second ringtone is within my capabilities!

Interesting idea! I think I will try this.

[wrldwzrd89]

Originally Posted by Applespider

It's also worthwhile when you save your shortened MP3 to cut the quality of it. You really don't need a 192bit stereo ringtone since your phone has only one speaker. Take it right down to the bare minimum and convert it to mono - it will cut the size dramatically and allow you to fit more on.

I used to use Audacity to do this when I had a PC. I assume Audacity for the Mac would do a similar job.

PS Another fun thing to do is to create Garageband ringtones. I'm not musical enough to create full blown symphonies but a 30 second ringtone is within my capabilities!

Linky - for those wondering where to get Audacity from.

As far as quality goes, the lowest settings I can recommend without the audio sounding distorted are 24 kbps (mono) / 48 kbps (stereo) bit rate (no VBR), 11.025 kHz sample rate, mono. If you're doing the encoding in iTunes (which is what I used to test the different settings), also check "filter frequencies below 10 Hz" and uncheck "smart encoding adjustments".

EDIT: 32 kbps starts to sound distorted at 11.025 kHz. iTunes won't let me choose 40 kbps at that sample rate though. 8 kHz sounds awful even at 64 kbps. (all bit rates are the stereo versions - divide by 2 for mono)

[InAppleHeaven]

Thanks Mox358. Seems like a cool program to do what I wanted. Now if you can just tell me how to use it, LOL. I tinkered with it and saved a clip to my desktop, but when I used bluetooth to send it to the phone, it said it failed. Should I cjange it to another format. It asked me what format, but had no idea what to use. Thanks in advance.