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Ringtones made in Garageband distort on iPhone

lamina

lamina

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Mar 9, 2006
1,757
69
Niagara
The ringtones I make in GarageBand distort pretty badly on my iPhone.

When I make a ringtone from a song, it sometimes sounds ok, but every time I mix one from a GarageBand loop, it distorts.

I've tried toning down the master volume on the track. Still a no go. Has anyone else experienced this?
 
Mine as well are great and it has been great to make a bunch of my own tones that I dont have to pay another .99 for!!
 
lamina said:
The ringtones I make in GarageBand distort pretty badly on my iPhone.

When I make a ringtone from a song, it sometimes sounds ok, but every time I mix one from a GarageBand loop, it distorts.

I've tried toning down the master volume on the track. Still a no go. Has anyone else experienced this?
Click to expand...
I agree, it does seem to lower the quality of the songs when you put them onto your iphone. The best way to tell is to compare it to the other ringtones that are already on the phone. I would be interested in a fix to this too.
 
When I say distort, I mean it really sounds like the speaker is being over-driven. The speaker isn't blown, because it works perfectly with music and other ringtones. There has to be something in Garageband that I've overlooked.
 
garageband by default exports the lowest quality to itunes, you can change this in preferences...also, it exports in .aiff, maybe try converting to mp3 ??

also....did you try lowering the master volume as well as the track volume?? this sometimes helps for songs in itunes...
 
Here's a ringtone for example. Give it a try on your iPhone and see what happens.

Edit: Ok so apparently I can't attach .m4r files.

Anyway all I do is click Share, then Send Ringtone to iTunes. No quality adjustments. I tried exporting as mp3, and the phone wouldn't accept it, even when renamed as .m4r. I also tried setting to a higher quality m4a and renaming to m4r.
 
lamina said:
When I say distort, I mean it really sounds like the speaker is being over-driven. The speaker isn't blown, because it works perfectly with music and other ringtones. There has to be something in Garageband that I've overlooked.
Click to expand...

I'm having this problem as well. I haven't tried anything to fix it yet, just set it to the iPhone Ad ringer for now.
 
I havnt used Garageband so I don't know if you can do this but... I have heard of people normalizing to -3dB when you do your mastering. This gives the volume a little headroom so as not to distort.
 
oftheheavens said:
i didnt know that you could make ringtones on garageband! can anyone point me towards a thread or site that explains how to do so?
Click to expand...

Drag and drop or use the iTunes tab in the media browser within GarageBand to import the song you want. Cut a 20-40 second clip of the song (default ring length is 20 seconds). If you have GB3 then select Share -> Export Song to Disk. Then, change the extension from .m4a to .mr4. Open in iTunes and voila. If you have GB4 then you should have the Share -> Send Ringtone To iTunes option.
 
M0bile said:
Drag and drop or use the iTunes tab in the media browser within GarageBand to import the song you want. Cut a 20-40 second clip of the song (default ring length is 20 seconds). If you have GB3 then select Share -> Export Song to Disk. Then, change the extension from .m4a to .mr4. Open in iTunes and voila. If you have GB4 then you should have the Share -> Send Ringtone To iTunes option.
Click to expand...

can you point me towards a site that goes a little more into detail? i tried to record but it either does nothing or sounds like a metro-dome. i am a rookie to gb so any help would be nice

edit: like really i have never used gb so i know nothing about it. i have version 4.something.
 
oftheheavens said:
can you point me towards a site that goes a little more into detail? i tried to record but it either does nothing or sounds like a metro-dome. i am a rookie to gb so any help would be nice

edit: like really i have never used gb so i know nothing about it. i have version 4.something.
Click to expand...


My ring tones are also distorted as mentioned above. There is another thread here someplace that talks about how Garage Band changes the bass or something for use on the phone. If you search I'm sure you'll find the thread.

In the meantime, I found this website for changing some of the settings in Garage Band: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/comments.php?enid=465#commentsanchor

I don't exactly understand it all as I am also new to this, but I'm going to try it.
 
FLKat said:
My ring tones are also distorted as mentioned above. There is another thread here someplace that talks about how Garage Band changes the bass or something for use on the phone. If you search I'm sure you'll find the thread.

In the meantime, I found this website for changing some of the settings in Garage Band: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/comments.php?enid=465#commentsanchor

I don't exactly understand it all as I am also new to this, but I'm going to try it.
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting this! I'm going to try this out as soon as I get home. I've noticed that sending a song to iTunes from Garageband as a ringtone makes it extremely "Trebbily"...Hopefully this will help.
 
Yeah, it doesn't EQ them. The iPhone's speaker can't produce audio below say 110hz. So any sounds that it tries to produce below that just sound like utter garbage. Make your ringtones in Audacity. EQ to cutoff anything below 100hz or so, you can normalize @ like -3.0 db depending on the song to increase the audio and you get great results.

For instance, try making a ringtone of Daft Punk - Robot Rock in Garageband and compare it to this one that I made i
Audacity:
http://idisk.mac.com/tedroddy/Public/Daft Punk - Robot Rock.m4r

There is no comparison, Audacity + EQ + Normalize is the only way to go. Yeah, it's more steps, but the result is SO. MUCH. BETTER.

EDIT: If you'll give me a few minutes I'll post one made in Garageband in case you don't have the song.

Yep, Garageband:
http://idisk.mac.com/tedroddy/Public/My Song.m4r

OMG BOOST THE TREBLE! Garbageband's ringtones sound like ass.
 
Make sure to turn off the preference for "Auto Normalize" (Export projects at full loudness) off. That helped reduce 80% of the static I was seeing.
 
making ringtones with itunes is easy and does not distort but you can't use songs you've bought on iTunes there's several videos on you tube on how to do it
 
Have you tried just making them in iTunes? That's what I did and they sound fine unless I turn the volume all the way up....but then even the orginal sounds distorted.
 
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