Trying Out Some New Things / Ringtones

I have been spending some time trying out some new technology related things lately. I hope to share some of them in the next several posts. Some of these new tools are items I found in issues of Macworld (subscription~priceless) and others I just sort of looked into because a need or curiosity arose. I will start with the latter.

During this past Christmas break I found myself spending a lot of time waiting around in my truck, usually for one or both of my boys to get out of or return from some sort of sporting or social event. I took this as an opportunity to spend some quality time with my cell phone. I downloaded an application so that I could find, preview, and download different ring-tones. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my cell phone (which I picked up at a yard sale for $5) would play ring-tones that were pieces of actual music, not just the MIDI variety. I soon discovered that these cool ring-tone would run about $3 each to download. That just seemed like too high a price to pay, so I kind of let the topic slip to backburner of my mind.

Another way that I spent some of my precious Christmas vacation time was downloading songs and videos to my oldest son's new 3G iPod Nano which he purchased using Christmas $. While at the iTunes Music Store searching for songs, I noticed that some of them had little bell icons next to them. My son told me that they were songs that could also be used as ring-tones. "Ahh Haa!" I thought. "Maybe I could use one of these as my ringtone?" I wondered. A little research into this idea came up fruitless for two reasons, one, it costs $2 for the ring-tone from the iTunes Store ($1 for the Song and $1 for the ability to edit it into a ring-tone) and two, they only work on iPhones. So, that option was out.

I finally decided to search for an easy, yet free, way to get actual music ring-tones on to my cell phone. A quick Google Search lead me to Mobile17. Once you register you are able to create ring-tones using .mp3 files you have on your computer. It will ask you to browse for the file. Next, it will ask how many seconds/minutes into the song you want to start the ring-tone. Then, it asks how long you want the ringtone to last. Finally, after hit SEND, it sends the ringtone (in my case as a PICT) to your cell phone. You open the PICT message, save it, and then select it to be your ring-tone. I tried this out twice for myself and it WORKS! I love finding ways to do things for FREE.

In my next posting I will share another cool thing that I found just from need or curiosity.