ToneShop Ringtone Creator

The idea behind ToneShop Ringtone Creator is to try and make it easy to make your own ringtones. That’s why there are no fancy controls to worry about. The only thing you need to do is listen.

Load in your supported audio file format (mp3, wav, wma or m4a) and immediately, it will appear on the transport controls showing the run-time of the file.

You can now use the Time Slider or the Play and Stop controls to play your file. You should hear it through the speakers or headphones of your PC or notebook.

While your file is playing, listen for the section you wish to make the ringtone from. Use the slider to move back to just before the start of that section you want, press Play and then when you’re at the start, press the Start button. This will make a note of the start location of your ringtone.

Keep playing until you get to the end of the section you want. Again, use the slider control to move back to just before the end point you want, press Play and when you get to it, press the Finish button. You should now see times (in seconds) in the text boxes next to the Start and Finish buttons.

When you’re done, you should get something looking like this.

In this example, we’re going to make the ringtone file from the points 77.732seconds to 91.863seconds in our test1.mp3 file.

Now at this point, you need to choose the ringtone format you want to use - mp3, wav, wma or m4a/r.

Once you’ve done that, choose a save filename and location.

After that, you need to look at the advanced options to choose the quality of the ringtone you’re about to make. The default options should work with most phones but you can tweak the settings up a bit to improve the audio quality. You can also increase the audio level if your original file is too soft. Just pull the slider to the right until you see a positive dB number. However, don’t use too much gain - it will make your ringtone louder but it may also cause “clipping distortion” which makes it sound like its been put through a blender.

Once you’ve done all that, you press the Convert button and within a second or two, depending on the length of the ringtone you’re creating, ToneShop should come back and tell you it’s completed.

Now you just copy the ringtone to your phone, tell your phone you want to use the new file as your ringtone and that’s about it.

It’s been a while but I’ve created a new version of my ToneShop Ringtone Creator software.

It’s always surprised me that people are willing to pay good money to download a ringtone for their mobile phone, especially when most of us have sufficient music either on CD or in MP3 files to create our own ringtones.

ToneShop Ringtone Creator uses a simple interface to allow you to make your own ringtone files. Once you’ve made them, sync them up to your phone and you can have your own personalised ringtone for free.

Previous versions of this app have appeared on lots of websites around the world - this is the first new version for 2009 and supersedes all other versions.

New build 74 now features the ability to set the audio quality of the ringtones, include mono or stereo tracks as well as set the sample frequency and even adjust the output audio level in the file itself.

The new version is available for download on the download page and requires a Windows 2000, XP, Vista or Windows 7 computer and a 16-bit sound card.

How it works

ToneShop Ringtone Creator relies on the FFmpeg encoding tool however it is not included in the ToneShop installation file. But don’t sweat - the installation file gives you all the details on where to get it and it’s really simple to do.

The way ToneShop Ringtone Creator works is that it allows you to play your audio file and then use the Start and Finish buttons to set which part of the file you want to use for the ringtone. These points can be set to 1/100th of a second and you can create MP3, WAV, WMA and M4A/R ringtones for a wide range of mobile cellphones.