The folks over at younevercall.com have put together a handy guide for Linux users looking to create their own ringtones. With cellphone companies charging as much as $3 for a twenty second ringtone, the guide should help Linux users save a little cash.As an added bonus all the software tools involved in the process, Audacity, LAME and BitPim, are free and open source.
The process isn’t too difficult, just download the apps, pick a song you’d like as your ringtone and slice out the section you want using Audacity. Then encode your edit as an MP3 using the LAME encoder and send it to your phone with BitPim.
If you’d like to skip a few steps, there’s also a number of file conversion sites online that will output ringtones in various formats and even let you edit file down to ringtone size snippets. Check out Media Convert, which makes it easy to upload and edit your file.
And of course if your phone has Bluetooth you should be able to send the file that way. Or alternately you could post it to a URL and use your phone’s browser to download the file.
Finally, for the truly lazy, there’s Ringtone Soup where you can browse user submitted ringtones and then send a download link to your phone. Of course any bandwidth charges from your provider will apply and the site is of dubious legality, so don’t say we didn’t warn you.