Creating Free Ringtones – revisited
This post is something I’ve been delaying as I didn’t want to turn it into a technical tutorial, but at this point I think I have it short and concise enough to be of use to some. In October I wrote a post on creating ring tones for my Samsung A740 phone. A lot of what I’ve found out should work for a number of Samsung, Sanyo, and LG phones. For those of you with other phones, this post won’t provide much direct aid but, it may show that with some investigation on the internet you may not have to rely on your mobile phone carrier’s internet access to use some of the additional features on your phone. At that point I’d been able to create ringtones as .qcp files (A Qualcomm format) that seem to work on most of these phones. I still needed internet access to get a ringtone to the phone. A reader, Eric J. indicated that I might be able to use BitPim to access the phone with a Data Cable. I’m putting the rest of this post after the continue as it may not be of interest to everyone.
Intially I was able read and write ringtones to the phone by accessing the file system on the phone directly, via BitPim. This was not recommended as the information at Bitpim said you could damage your phone, but I went ahead and chanced it anyway. Some threads at Dagon Design provided me with enough information to do this, though with the newest download from BitPim I don’t have to go through this much effort. I finally contacted BitPim via email and ‘talked’ to the developer that was programming the Samsung portion, Stephen Wood. He was able to offer some short-cuts. Fortunately he was doing some work that accomodated my type of phone. I was able to do some testing (pretty minimal effort on my part) for him and he was able to provide some updated beta software, which is soon to be released. The new version allows me to sync my MSOutlook work calendar to my personal phone and set the alarm time before meetings. This was something I was not looking for at all when I started my investigations, but I’ve found it to be useful. I am also able to either save my phone book or update it from my Laptop.
Some Other Interesting Tidbits
The Data Cable I used was from FutureDial (actually bought at Radio Shack) for about 20 bucks. It looks like you can get them someplaces for cheaper, but I didn’t want to wait, and I wanted to know the company I was dealing with. I purchased the FutureDial Mobile Phone Data Cable listed for Samsung A310, A600. The A740 is not listed but this is the right cable.I downloaded the need drivers from Future Dial.
If you have the ringtones and internet access you can bypass the BitPim and data cable approach and may be able to send the ringtone to the phone via this link
I wish my phone wasn’t so incredibly ghetto and old. I can’t get any cool rings.