ToneShop is a small, free program that can create ringtones out of your audio files for any phone that supports a true audio ringtone, including the Apple IPhone.
It provides the ability to quickly and easily select a snippet of sound from within your audio files to be used as a ringtone.
I’ve had my eye out for a simple program that can quickly create ringtones out of MP3s for my IPhone when I found this program, which in fact can do this for a very wide range of phones and devices.
ToneShip is in fact a frontend GUI for FFMPEG, the encoding engine which the majority of freeware video and audio conversion programs are based. Here are more notes on this one.
- How it works: simply load an audio file, then use the (0.1 second precision) trackbar to identify beginning and end points for your ringtone (note that different phones vary on length of ringtone they will accept, so take that into consideration). You can also enter in the start and finish positions as values manually, and preview the ringtone snippet by pressing the “show” button. Finally, select the desired ringtone file format from the dropdown and press the “convert” button to create your ringtone.
- Phones supported: all phones that use true audio ringtones. Go here for a (non-exhaustive) list.
- Audio file types supported: can input MP3, WAV, WMA, and M4A formats, and produce ringtones in MP3, WAV (uncompressed PCM), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec, .m4a), Nokia TrueTones (AMR-WB, .amr), AMR-NB (.amr)
Yamaha SMAF (.mmf),ADPCM (4-bit compressed PCM. way), and Apple IPhone (AAC, .m4r).
Wish list:
- The ability to “preview” your snippet from any point within the snippet, rather than having to start it from the beginning. This would be useful, for example, if you simply want to preview the best possible ending position.
- While the trackbar works fairly well, it would be nice to have a larger trackbar inside the interface that can add more sensitivity to the slider as it is moved around.
- A trackbar that uses a visual representation of the audio (i.e Audacity-style waves with hills and valleys). The ability to see the audio could help in quickly finding the best beginning and ending places for the ringtone.
- If the third one is too involved, I’ll settle for the first two
The verdict: a rather nice, straightforward freeware program that performs a useful function and does it well.
Version Tested: Build 16.
Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP or Vista.
The program page no longer exists, but you can download ver. 16. of the program here.
