From the beach

Greetings from Hermosa Beach. Kevin told me about this iPhone app for wordpress and so I decided to check it out. I’m gonna try inserting a pic from the beach. And these people will not stop kicking sand over me and my phone as they walk by. Damn them.

Creating an iPhone ringtone

I love my iPhone.  Let’s start with that.  I find I listen to a lot more music when I’m walking around town than I did before just because I’ve now got an iPod in my pocket too.  I take more pictures because I have a camera too.  But that doesn’t mean the iPhone doesn’t have its limitations.  One of the biggest ones for me is the fact that you can’t use the songs that are already on your iPhone as a ringtone.  Of course Apple doesn’t want this because they want you to create your own ringtone for $0.99 on iTunes.

Well, I went on a personal mission to figure out how to create a ringtone and many failed and frustrated attempts later I think I’ve got it down.  The instructions below are for a Mac, but I imagine they’re fairly similar on a Windows.  Here’s what you need to do:

 

1. Trim out the part of the sing you want to use as your ringtone.  I use a freeware program called MP3 Trimmer.
2. Fine tune your ringtone (about 10-15 seconds is ideal) and then save it as an mp3 on your desktop
3. Open the ringtone mp3 with iTunes.  Double-click the mp3 file or from iTunes go to ‘File’ and choose ‘Add to Library…’ (thanks Ed)
4. In iTunes, right-click the ringtone mp3 and choose Save As AAC.  (if this option doesn’t appear, open up iTunes preferences and change the importing options to be AAC).
5. A new song will appear in iTunes.  Right-click it and choose Show in Finder.
6. Rename the song in Finder, changing the extension from .m4a to .m4r.
7. Copy the .m4r song to your Ringtones folder under where iTunes saves your music.  (This can usually be found by opening Finder, clicking Music in the left folder column and then scrolling down to the Ringtones folder).
8. Open the .m4r song from the Ringtones folder using iTunes.  It should automatically be recognized as a ringtone.  You will know this because iTunes will display it in the Ringtones folder.

I hope that helps and that you finally make that “Who Can it Be Now?” ringtone that you’ve always wanted.

You can find the ringtones I’ve made in the right column of my blog.  Download the ringtone you want and start with step 7 of these instructions, copying it into your Ringtones folder.

Midomi – notfomi

Updated 8/8/8 – I no longer feel the same about Midomi as I did the first time I tried it.  I still think it’s an amazing concept but the app just doesn’t do what it says it does.  There have been a couple of times I’ve had a song on the radio that I wanted to know who it was, and so I held up Midomi to the speakers, as they suggest to do, but it never figures it out.  Not even once.  I’ve heard of another app called Shazam that supposedly does a similar thing.  I’m not sure I’m ready for the emotional investment after being so let down by Midomi.  The original post title was Midomi! but now it is simply Midomi – notfomi.

Original post - This must be the coolest iPhone app out there. Have you ever had a song or even just a short part of the rhythm stuck in your head, and you wanted to know what song it is? Meet Midomi. You literally sing or hum for a few seconds and it’ll show you what song it is. Amazing. And you can hold it up to your radio and it will tell you the name of the song playing.

I will add that it’s not perfect. I gave it the official, stringent Emile test singing a variety of songs and here’s how it fared:

• Amazing Grace – first test.  It listed a bunch of songs with Amazing Grace the #2 and #3 songs.  Not bad.
• Major Tom (by Peter Schilling) – it found this song pretty easily.  I used this song because Katia called me up back in March humming the tune to this song and really wanting to know the name.  Perfect time to call up Midomi.
• Easily I Approach (by Eazy E) – it never found this.  I tried several times.  I’d rap the opening few lines for about 20 seconds.  Usually it just stayed there spinning.  One time it crashed the app.  Finally one time it brought up a list of potential matches, none of which were right.  Several were Italian.  And there was even one Hilary Duff entry.  Nice.  I’m glad to know my voice resembles that of Hilary Duff.
• Low (Apple Bottom Jeans) – first off, I felt really lame singing this.  I thought it’d be a cool song to sing but I was mistaken.  I tried this twice.  The first time I tried, it crashed Midomi.  Then the second time it found no matches.  Seems like Midomi may have issues matching rap songs. 
• One Moment In Time – nailed it.  This is the ultimate song and I would have been very disappointed in Midomi didn’t match it.  But it did.  Perfectly.  I’d like to think part of it was my spot-on rendition of it.

Definitely a cool app that you need to get.  Now I just need to stop referring to it as Midori and get the name right.