Ringtone Maker

How the Ringtone Maker works

A ringtone is a short clip that has to work from a cold start: the phone starts it at full volume, usually in a pocket or across a room, and stops it the moment you answer. That makes the choice of section and the shape of the start and end more important than the audio quality. This page does the three things that matter — picks the section, caps the length and fades the edges — and leaves the rest of the sound alone.

Choosing the section

Most people want the hook: the chorus, the riff or the drop. It is usually not at the start of the file. Songs often open with 10 to 30 seconds of intro that sounds like nothing when it plays from a phone speaker. Use the waveform to find the loud, dense section — the chorus is normally the widest part of the picture — and drag across it. Press Preview to hear exactly what will be saved, then nudge the handles until the clip starts on a beat.

A ringtone that loops cleanly is easier to live with. If the clip starts just before the downbeat of a bar and ends just after the last beat of a phrase, the restart sounds deliberate. The BPM Detector tells you the tempo: at 120 BPM a four-beat bar lasts 2 seconds, so a 30-second ringtone holds 15 bars, or very nearly four 4-bar phrases.

Why 30 seconds

Android accepts ringtones of any length, but the phone only rings for 20 to 30 seconds before the call goes to voicemail, so anything longer is never heard. The iPhone rejects ringtones longer than 40 seconds and alert tones longer than 30. The default cap of 30 seconds suits both and keeps the file small. If you select more, the stats panel says so and the clip is trimmed from the end of your selection, so the start you chose is kept.

Fades

A hard cut at the start of a clip clicks, and on a phone speaker a click at full volume is startling. A 300 to 800 millisecond fade in removes the click without losing the first beat. The fade out matters more: it is what you hear every time the ringtone loops, so a longer 1 to 2 second fade makes the restart feel like a new bar rather than a jump. Set either fade to 0 if the section you picked already starts or ends in silence.

Level

Phone speakers are small, and a quiet master makes a quiet ringtone. Peak normalisation raises the clip so its loudest sample sits at −1 dBFS, which is as loud as it can go without clipping and leaves a little headroom for the MP3 encoder. It does not compress or change the balance of the music. For heavily mastered pop the peak is already close to full scale and nothing changes; older recordings and classical pieces can gain 6 dB or more. Switch normalisation off to keep the original level.

Android, iPhone and the format question

The export is MP3. Android has played MP3 ringtones since its first release, and you can set one by copying it into the Ringtones folder on the phone, or by opening the file and choosing "Set as ringtone" in most file managers. Feature phones, smartwatches and desk phones that accept custom tones also generally take MP3.

The iPhone does not. Its ringtones must be .m4r files, which are AAC audio in an MPEG-4 container. Browsers can decode AAC but none of them can encode it, and this page does not ship an AAC encoder, so it cannot write an .m4r. The usual route on a Mac is to open the MP3 in Music, convert it to AAC, rename the result from .m4a to .m4r and drag it onto the phone in Finder. GarageBand on the iPhone itself can also import an MP3 and share it as a ringtone.

Bitrate

MP3 at 128 kbps is indistinguishable from the original on a phone speaker and keeps a 30-second clip around 0.5 MB. Pick 192 or 320 kbps if the ringtone will also be played through headphones or a car stereo. Mono songs stay mono and stereo songs stay stereo; the phone mixes them down itself.

Ringtone maker tips

• Pick a section with energy in the middle frequencies. Phone speakers reproduce almost nothing below 300 Hz, so a bass-led drop can sound empty. A vocal hook or a guitar riff carries much better.
• Avoid long quiet intros. If the first five seconds are soft, you will miss calls in noisy places. Start at the loud part and use a short fade in.
• Check it on the phone. Preview here plays through your computer's speakers. The real test is the phone's speaker at full volume across a room.
• Only use music you have the right to copy. Making a ringtone for your own phone from music you own is ordinary personal use in most places; sharing or selling it is not.

For a plain cut without the length cap, the Audio Trimmer keeps any length, and Fade In and Out adds fades to a whole file.

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