This tutorial will teach you how to create your own ringtones from mp3′s and then transfer the files to your cellphone over the air with text messages.

Awhile back we learned how to transfer your own legally purchased mp3′s to your Verizon cellphone and be able to listen to music without having to purchase songs thru Verizon’s very expensive and clunky “service”. You can find that tutorial here.

The only thing I can think of that would cost anything  is the actual text message you will be sending yourself with the ringtone attached, so check your rate on “picture messages” before going too crazy.

Using Audacity, an opensource, free, sound editor available for both Windows and Linux platforms, we can crop our legally purchased mp3′s into “ringtone length” midi files. Let’s walk thru it.

Download and install Audacity. For Linux, I just use Synaptic Package Manager | Search for Audacity | And install from there as any dependancy files will be automatically installed as well, including the very important LAME encoder. If you are installing this on Windows, make sure you install and configure the LAME encoder which will allow you to export as mp3.

Now that Audacity is installed and configured with the LAME encoder, let’s open an mp3 that you want to crop for a ringtone.

Open Audacity and choose File | Open. Path out to an mp3 file and Open it. It may take several seconds for Audacity to open it and then you will see the file in the timeline window (click the image below for a larger screenshot of the Audacity interface):

Listen to the song by clicking the play button and make a note of what section of the song you want to crop as the ringtone.

Using the select tool,  click and drag to highlight the area for the ringtone. You won’t have to be too specific right now, we will tweak the crop in the next step. Just generally select the area you want. With it selected, it should look like this:

Next, click on the menu Edit | Trim, which will leave just the selection, cutting away the rest of the song. Great! Now let’s fine tune our trim and save it to send to your cellphone.

Click on the Zoom tool,  to zoom in on each side of the song. Click and drag with the Select tool, to highlight the area you want to cut away. From the menu choose Edit | Cut to trim away the highlighted area. I like to use Cut, as then I can “undo” if needed. Continue this process until you are happy with your ringtone track.

Now, let’s export it and get it ready to send to the cellphone. From the menu, choose File | Export. This dialog box will pop up. I recommend making the name of the file short for simplicity in viewing the file on your phone. Verify that mp3 is the export format type and where the file will be saved:

Click Save. You will get an additional popup for tagging the file (the meta information), I usually just leave the defaults and click Ok:

Now, we have to rename the file to midi, so that our cellphone will recognize it as a ringtone. Easy enough. Just edit the file extension and change it from mp3 to midi. Make sure you are changing the file extension and not just the file name. For example:

Dragostea_Din_Tei.midi

Now, to get that midi over to your cellphone with a picture/text message.  You can use gmail, Yahoo, etc to send an email to your cellphone with the midi file attached.

Send an email with the attached midi to YOUR_CELLPHONE_NUMBER@vzwpix.com

When you receive the message on your cellphone, open it and download the attachment. Now you can save the download/attachment as a ringtone! That’s it!

Remember, check your rates/plan to see if there are extra costs for you to receive PICTURE messages. That’s the transport we are using to get the ringtone to your phone. Other than that, free ringtones from your own music collection, custom edited by you – how cool is that?!

For exhausting information on using Audacity, check out the Tips wiki here.

I created this tutorial while experimenting on my Samsung U550. In general this process should work for most phones on Verizon. If you need a more exhaustive tutorial, check out Audacity’s version of Making Ringtones.

And if you need info on other cellphones and carriers, check out Howard Forums.