GarageBand has a built in function to help you build ringtones for your iPhone from music in your library. Since GB comes with every new Mac and is part of iLife, free is a good price. However, folks who haven’t experience with audio recording apps or who want to make a specific ringtone for everyone of their friends, as does my daughter, (perhaps not THAT many), often find that while GarageBand works, it doesn’t “just work”. Pocket Mac, who gained notoriety building software to sync Macs to a variety of smartphones, build a utility called Ringtone Studio that makes the process of making your own ringtones incredibly simple.

The UI is user friendly and super easy. Just drag the sound file, video file or iTunes file onto the “iPhone” and then using the sliders select the portion of the clip you want for your ringtone. Ringtones should be kept short, about 8 seconds before it starts looping is a good place to start.

The only real downside to the app that I have found is the price. Frankly $20 USD is a lot to pay for what this thing does, but I see other apps in similar price ranges that do much less. One that remains unnamed inserts ringtones onto your phone. That’s it. So I suppose Ringtone Studio isn’t completely out of line, but I think that these folks would sell a lot more copies if they brought the price below $10.

The net of things is that it works. You drag your file on, you select the region for the ringtone, save it (goes to iTunes directly – or at least it did for me) then sync your iPhone, adding the ringtones you’ve created via the Ringtone tab on the sync page in iTunes. I’m not sure it could get much easier.

There are people who just burn up when your phone sounds like anything but a phone, but if you want it to sound like “you” this can work pretty darn well. Of course tastes vary so just because the ringtone was easy to make, doesn’t make it “good”.

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Don’t steal movies and / or music.  There.  Now that that’s done I can get to the point of the post.

Lately, on the odd occasion that I actually buy a movie, I look for Blu Ray versions with the digital content option to make it very easy to get the movie that I am paying for onto my AppleTV and iPad.  Unfortunately there are movies I have bought and movies that are being reissued that I want that don’t have this option.

Lots of people, including myself have written about how to get your movies off your legally purchased media into digital format that you can reuse for your personal use.  That’s not the point of this post.

When I look at my digital content, I like the metadata to be complete and the artwork to be clean.  In the past I would hunt this stuff down manually, then for audio, let iTunes do the Gracenote update.  But movies were always a pain.  I tried MetaTag X and while it could work, I more than often enough had corruption of the file occur and I found the write changes process to be really slow.  So I gave up.

This past week I discovered an amazing little tool called Subler.  It uses data from Tagchimp and makes updating metadata and artwork incredibly easy.  Open the movie file in Subler.  Type the title into the search box.  Select which of the returned options you prefer.  Save the file.  Done.

Subler has a very basic UI and does this one thing only.  But it does it extremely well.  Subler is written by Damiano Galassi.  At the time of this post, it is at version 0.97 and available for download at http://code.google.com/p/subler/ It is a Mac app requiring OS X 10.5 or later and works fine under Snow Leopard.

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