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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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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 9:45 am and is filed under OS X, Utilities, iTunes, iphone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.