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DEL.ICIO.USCustom ringtones the wave file of the future
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Making “stealth” ringtones and planting them in the phones of your friends has never been easier.
Imagine my girlfriend’s surprise when I called and she heard my melodious baritone screaming “Answer the BLEEP phone woman!”
She still dates me strangely enough. The allure of Geekdom is strong.
Editing sound files to create a ringtone is not difficult. All you need is a computer, free software and the willingness to learn. A microphone would be needed to record any screaming, of course.
I am sure many Geekboy readers do not need any help, but for those of you scared by the thought of making your own ringtone, I humbly offer the following guide, which has worked on the three Sprint phones I have access to.
I can make a ringtone in less than a minute easily, and so can you.
First, download Wavepad. Be sure to get the free version.
We can either edit an existing sound or make our own. Since I don’t want a gaggle of lawyers writing the newspaper, we will create our own.
Wavepad has text-to-speech capability that will allow for all kinds of zaniness. But first we have to download and install two super-small files available here.
Once those are downloaded, install them. You may get a message that says certain files already exist. If so, click “No to all.”
OK, now let’s get cracking on making a ringtone that says “Your oppressor is calling” whenever the bossman decides to disturb your 2-hour lunch.
In Wavepad, go to the TOOLS menu and click TEXT TO SPEECH. A little box will pop up asking for a sample rate and whether the file should be stereo or mono. The default setting, mono at 44,100 kilohertz, is fine, so just click OK.
Now simply type “Your oppressor is calling” in the next box that appears and in the dropdown box select one of the “robot” voices. I am using RoboSoft2.
To personalize it, you can use your name, so mine would say “Geekboy, your oppressor is calling.”
Once you click “Synthesize Voice” a wave will appear and play the cool robot voice. Try some other voices and pick the one you like best.
Now, if using RoboSoft2 voice, if you look at the lower right corner of the program window, we can see we are left with a waveform that is about 1.7 seconds long. This is not long enough, we need a file just under 30 seconds in length because that is how long a cellphone rings before voicemail typically activates.
We are going to create a loop, meaning we will repeat the waveform over and over until we reach 30 seconds.
It sounds pretty stupid to have the voice not “pause” so we are going to insert 1.2 seconds of silence between each “ring.” Why 1.2 seconds? Because that will make the loopable part 2.9 seconds long, which, if we loop 10 total times will give us almost the perfect length.
To insert 1.2 seconds of silence, go to EDIT on the menu, the select INSERT SILENCE at the END of the file. A little box will appear, so punch in 1200, which is 1.2 seconds in milliseconds.
If at any point the file starts playing and you want to stop it, simply click the button at the STOP bottom of the program window. It is the button with the square on it. You can also hit rewind and fast forward if need be.
Once the silence is added, SELECT ALL (hit the control key and “a” key at the same time).
Now to create the loop, go to EDIT and REPEAT LOOP and tell it to repeat the waveform 9 times. Once you do, you will see the waveform is now 29-plus seconds long. Perfect!
Now SELECT ALL again so all 29+ seconds are highlighted.
If you are using music or anything else with a lot of bass, you will want to get rid of the lowest tones because they can destroy the tiny speaker in your cellphone. The digitized voice does not really have the kind of bass that destroys speakers, so I am including this step only for those using a snippet of a song with a lot of thump.
To get rid of bass, go to EFFECTS and select HIGH PASS FILTER, which allows highs (treble) to pass through, but kills lows (the bass). A little box will appear – change the 250 to something more reasonable like 160 or even 120.
Once you have done this the file will play and you can hear the difference.
Now we want to make the file loud enough, but not too loud. This is called “normalizing.” Once again, this step is not necessary with the voice synthesizer, but I am including it in case you are importing music or some other sound file into Wavepad.
SELECT ALL again then go to EFFECTS and select NORMALIZE. When the box appears, change the 100 to 90. If you find that is too loud when you begin using the ringtone, try it at 80.
We are done!
To save the ringtone go to FILE and select SAVE FILE AS.
Give the file a name, something short, like “rt_boss.”
In the first popup, you should save the file as a WAVE, which should be the default..
Once you click OK a second window pops up, the top dropbox should say PCM, which is the default, but the second dropbox should be changed to 8 kHz, 16-bit mono. Make sure you change this you will not be able to convert the file to something your phone can use as a ringtone.
And that’s it. Once you walk through the steps a few times you will be able to make robot voice ringtones in about 30 seconds. The more enterprising among you may even want to make the voice say the name of the person calling and associate that ringtone with their phone number.
To use the ringtone, you will need to follow the instructions in Step 3 and Step 4 of the original ringtone article.
Good luck!
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