Music and mobiles have always mixed. This has been true ever since the current generation of mobile phones first appeared on the scene, with ringtones that transcended mere bell-based sound effects and beginning to approximate song melodies with their MIDI-style beeping. Of course, while popular for its time this was quickly deemed passé and made to evolve at roughly the same rate as the mobile phones themselves. This resulted in polytones, which overlaid multiple MIDI-style arrangements to produce a closer approximation of the original melody. Ringtones called “true tones” or “real tones” followed suit shortly, as phones had by that point evolved to the level of playing actual sound clips, usually in MP3 format.
Ringtone downloading has since become a booming business; although the size of the boom itself has been declining to a degree of late, this has not diminished the role of music in mobile content overall. Along with making ringtones available via various text-ordering and internet-based download services, mobile content providers have developed various means of making mobile users’ favorite artists, songs and albums accessible to users and profitable for both the mobile and music industries. Applications like iTunes have made music and ringtone downloading alike easy and user-friendly for many mobile users, and new apps targeting the same functionality are developed and released almost daily.
What about users who wish to convert some of their music to ringtones, however? The meshing of the music and mobile industries has made this audience an inevitably multitudinous one for companies to cater to. As such, there have been plenty of applications that offer a simple but effective interface that allows users to view their music files in waveform format, and trim them to just the desired portions of the song, using start and end point markers to highlight the ringtone-length portion to be used. Many of these are web-based services, however, although a good handful of apps have surfaced allowing the trimming process to be carried out on a mobile phone itself.
One of these apps is Ringdroid, a ringtone creation app for the Android smartphone platform. The app works on any song currently in a user’s Android phone, allowing the user to clip the song to a desired ringtone length suitable for call or message notification and affording a great degree of phone customization. Upon installation, the app takes the user to a list of all his songs, from where the desired target song can be found by sorting through all of the song titles or typing in the song name. Selecting the song opens the Ringdroid ringtone editor, from where two sliders can help the user mark the desired ringtone’s start and end points on a waveform display. Rewind, Fast Forward, Play/Pause and Zoom functions help make the selections more precise, and the Save function allows the user to decide whether he wants the final clip to be Music, Alarm, Notification or Ringtone. The simple functionality that apps like Ringdroid allow can be taken for granted, but are ultimately very valuable for users who want quick ringtone fixes and have the tracks already in their library.
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