Never Pay For A Ringtone Again!

This is a really cool trick I want to share for a couple of reasons:

a) it's a micro-precursor of my MLIS 5543 Web Design term project, and

b) to turn you on to a brilliant opensource app called Audacity. Any time I can preach the virtues of OSS, I feel I have to spread the word . . .

With this trick, you can take any part of any song and create your very own personalized ringtone. For instance, I'm a guitar guy, so I don't want the chorus of a song as a ringtone -- I want a crushing riff or a ripping solo! Audacity lets you take any song file in your possession and pluck just the right section or part to use as an MP3 ringtone on your phone (provided, of course, that your phone is USB-enabled, has Bluetooth, or has some other way download the file). Best of all, it's all perfectly legal -- and free !!!

In an effort to keep things Krug-like, I'm going to break it into steps:

1) Go to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ to download the Audacity application, free of charge.

2) Once it's installed, use Audacity to open any .wav or .mp3 music file you have on your computer (Audacity can't open files directly from a CD; they have to be ripped first). It will open the file as a waveform, which will look something like this:










3) Press the "Play" button (w/ the green arrow) to listen to the song. Press the "Stop" button (w/ the yellow square) when you've heard the part you like.

4) When you find the part you want, simply click-and-drag that portion of the waveform with your mouse to select it, just like you would with plain text in a Word document. Then, copy or cut the selection, a la plain text.

5) Open a new, blank Audacity file from the File menu, and paste your selection there.

6) Select "Export as MP3" from the File drop-down menu, and tell Audacity where to save the file.

**The first time you do this, Audacity will prompt you to download a LAME MP3 encoder, and should walk you through exactly how to do it. In case it doesn't, you can get a thorough walk-through here. Do this once, and you'll never have to do it again.

7) Download the file to your phone in your preferred manner. With a lot of phones, like the Motorola RAZR I have, it's as simple as plugging in a mini-USB cable and treating the phone as an external disk drive.

Hopefully this makes sense; for a more thorough explanation, you can visit the Audacity Wiki.
My kids and I have a ball doing this -- I even made a ringtone of my 8-year-old son playing his own single-string rendition of "Smoke On The Water." If I knew how to put audio on this blog, I'd share it with you.

LONG LIVE OPEN SOURCE! ROCK ON!