The best way to get your device customized is to start loading your own ringtones and notifications. We discussed how to find your way around the Android Operating Syetem to change those last week (which you can find here).
The app to help us make our own sounds to use for our alarms, ringtones and notifications is Ringdroid. In my humble opinion, it is the easiest/most robust app to get this done at no cost to you. That’s right folks, it’s free in the Android Market. If you’d like to grab Ringdroid now, you can do that by either scanning the QR code below, or by clicking the Android Market Link.
Now that you’ve got Ringdroid, let’s open it up and see what you can do. It’s best if you already have some music loaded onto your device as well :P. That said, the screen you’ll see will be just like what you see below. It should have scanned and located most, if not all of the audio files (mp3s) you have on your device. To start editing a new sound, simply press on the song you want. You can also press “Record New” which will use your Android’s mic to record audio around you. So if you wanted Ron Burgandy to yell “Cannonball!” for your facebook notifications, you can simply record part of the movie Anchorman as it plays and edit it later. Very cool and easy!
*The blue arrow pointing down at the right side of each song gives you the option of either editing the name of the song, or deleting it.*
Now that you’ve selected the song, Ringdroid will open the file into a visible wave editor. All you need to do is drag the left or right arrows on the wave to highlight a section of the song. It is best to keep the sound sample for your ringtones and notifications to about 30 seconds maximum. If they are any longer, it may take a little longer to load the file and play the sound when you have new notifications or calls coming in, depending on your Android device.
You can listen to the area you selected by pressing the Play button at the bottom left. Also, if you need to zoom in so you can get that timing just right, there are Zoom + and Zoom – buttons at the bottom. I use those a lot to get the start and end of a sample just right.
You can save the audio file as a Ringtone, Music, Alarm and Notification file. Also, you can give it a name to help you identify it later when you select it in Sounds Settings. The reason for separating the types is that for certain apps, they look for ‘Notification’ files to display when you are changing the notification setting, and therefore won’t display some of the ‘Ringtones’ you may have created but wanted to use as a notification sound. Once you’ve got the sound saved, you can follow this tutorial on where to go to change your sounds and ringtones!
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