Create your own ringtones!

Well, actually this is not an "Ubuntu-Exclusive" but I think you guys should know.

Let's say you have a cool song and want to have a ringtone of it on your cellphone...Prepare yourself, if you buy it from your carrier you'll end up paying $3.00+ for the song and the Internet time you use to download it to your cell.

Well, there's an easy and inexpensive way to do this...and it's called "Audacity"! No, no need to take out your credit card, Audacity is absolutely free and it's a very handy program for all your music-editing needs, not to mention that it is available on the repositories.

Let's stick to the topic here. To make a ringtone simply choose your favorite song.

Now open up Audacity by going to Applications>Sound & Video>Audacity.



Click File>Open and then select the song you want to ringtonify...




Now with the cursor in Selection mode select the part of the song you want for your ringtone by dragging the cursor.



Fiddle back and forth with Play and Pause and make sure that the selected area is exactly how you want it. Once the area is selected click the "Trim" button (check the picture below to see the location of the button).






Now switch the cursor to Time Shift Tool. And drag the chosen part to the start of the timeline.



Now switch back to Selection mode. And select the areas where you might want to add an effect, like Fade IN or Fade OUT. For these effects select the beginning of the song (where you want the fade to take effect). Now click on Effects and select Fade In from the dropdown list.




For fade out do the exact same thing but selecting the end of the song and then Fade Out on the dropdown.

And DONE! You now have a freshly baked ringtone for your cellphone! Now simply go to File> Export and give it a name and a format on the new window. Select Mp3 Files on the dropdown on the bottom of the window.

And now all you need is aBluetooth adapter or a card reader to send it to your cellphone. I won't be going into great detail here because every cellhpone works different. In my case I use both Bluetooth and a card reader 9sometimes) to sync my new ringtones to my LG Shine CU720.

Anyway, I hope this was helpful and I hope I was clear enough! Remember to post comments!

NOTE: You can do the exact same thing in Windows. Audacity is multi-platform!


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Cool Programs You Might Need v2.0

Here's another list of somewhat common, but very useful programs!

gtk-recordmydesktop (Available in Synaptic) - Neat and tidy utility to record your desktop's activity. This is a great program to show off your Compiz effects to your friends!

VLC (Available in Synaptic) - Great, lightweight and almost perfect media player. I said almost perfect because somehow it reads almost any format on known to man and several known to monkeys! It's great and easy to use!

FFmpeg (Available in Synaptic) - **For best results add the Medibuntu repositories before trying to install ffmpeg. The instructions are pretty easy to follow** This is one of the most comprehensive video format converters found in Linux. This is a command-line tool!

WinFF (Found here!) - This is the Graphical User Interface for FFmpeg which make slife a whole lot easier!

Audacity (Available in Synaptic) - Great music editing program! It's a great option to make ringtones on Linux since most Windows-based ringtone-makers don't work on Wine.

That's it for today! Hope this helps someone!
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