I made some ringtones for my cell phone yesterday - partly out of curiousity, partly because I wanted some personalized ringing sounds and mostly because I like to play around with stuff.
Here's the scoop on how to create ringtones for a Nokia 6102 cell phone (specifics for your model may - and probably do - vary).
1. Search for free ringtones using Google.
2. After an hour or so, give up on the idea of free ringtones.
3. Search for how to create your own ringtones using Google.
4. After an hour or so give up on reading anything on the internet about creating your own ringtones.
5. Buy a ringtone (I bought one from Cingular - my provider) just to see what the darn things are....turns out this one was a little mp3 file. The ringtones can also be .mid files - the cell phone makers call midi files - polyphonic ring tones. I'm guessing part of the reason they don't make it more obvious that ringtones use standard audio formats is that there is a lot of money to be made from selling ringtones.
Suffice it to say I had quite a few false starts so I'm going to cut to the chase here -
What you need to do is (a) create a small sized MP3 or midi file for your ring tone and (b) download it to your phone.
I used two free software applications - Nokia PC Suite to download files from my computer to my phone and WavePad to convert some .wav files to .mp3 and then cut and shape some clips into ring sounds.
I used an infrared (IR) connection from a laptop to connect to my phone and download the files I made. You could use a special cable from the USB port as well - but you have to buy one from Nokia. There's probably some way to get the phone to connect to a web server, and download the .mp3 files, but I didn't get around to that since I wasn't really interested in paying Cingular data transfer fees while I played around.
Here's a few sample ringtones I cooked up.
Although I enjoyed spending the better part of an afternoon making and loading my first ringtone, you might decide it's better to spend $2.49 for a ringtone from your service provider. The bulk of my time was figuring out how to make a ringtone and how to get my phone to talk to a laptop. Now that I know how to do that, it only takes me a few minutes to create and download new ones.
