Review: Ringtone Designer Pro for iPhone

Everybody wants custom ringtones, right? Alright, I guess not everybody because you do encounter those people wandering around out in public that, for some unfathomable reason, still sport the same old boring default tones that came with their phone. Granted, those people annoy me and I shake my head in something like pity as I pass them by, but hey, it takes all kinds.

I’ve been in and out of the ringtone loop on the iPhone,  but it’s never been as easy and painless as it should have been. Why, for instance, should one have to purchase a track then purchase it again, basically, in order to create a ringtone from it has always been beyond me. Of course there have always been work arounds, with some more successful than others; I gave the free version of ImTOO’s Ringtone Maker a go and found it a breeze to use, but couldn’t really justify the $15 price tag for the full version. And before anyone rises up to smite me for being lazy…yes, I’m sure there are a plethora of workable and totally free(well, aside from properly paying for the music in the first place) solutions out there on the interwebs. The smiters would be correct in this case, I’ve been too lazy to do an in depth search for said solutions; I usually look around and latch onto something that looks promising pretty quickly. Which is why I decided to throw down the $1.99 for Blackout Labs Ringtone Designer Pro.

Ringtone Designer Pro can take any track on your phone and turn it into a custom ringtone. The controls couldn’t be much simpler, you’re presented with one button when you open the app and tapping it takes you to the tunes in your library. Just select a track and Ringtone Designer Pro gives you a cool little interface with the waveform of the song and a changeable duration window with which you can tweak until you have just the right part of the song you want for your ringtone. Tap save and Ringtone Designer Pro automatically converts and crops your selection into a new ringtone. Your ringtone won’t actually be available for use, however, until you connect your phone with your computer and use iTunes’ filesharing option to transfer the new ringtone over to your hard drive somewhere and then open the ringtone track with iTunes or simply drag it from your saved location into your iTunes library. Lastly, just sync up your phone with iTunes and your new custom ringtones will be ready to go.

Actually a relatively painless ringtone creation process, although the extra step(yeah, I know whiny right?) of having to transfer the ringtone from your phone onto your hard drive then back into iTunes and the phone seems a little fiddly, I can probably live with it. I was disappointed and frustrated by the lack of any track time display when you’re trying to find that sweet spot in a track; it turns the process into an even more trial-and-error-type exercise than it already is. But again, for a buck ninety-nine [iTunes link], it’s not too fiddly and I’ll probably be using it again…unless I turn un-lazy and find a better solution.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 5th, 2010 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Apple iPhone, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.