Ever since I got my first cellphone in December, I’ve been thinking that I ought to put a custom ringtone on it. This was reinforced a few weeks ago, when a student’s phone rang with the same standard ringtone that I had chosen (the “Sparse” ringtone on the Android phone).
I did not want to buy a ringtone (I’m cheap), nor steal one (I’m honest), nor even use an open-source ringtone. I wanted a truly custom one that no one else in the world could have.
Many years ago, I composed some renaissance dance music and in 2007 I had put the scores into Finale Notepad on my Mac. So my thought was that I could just take the music that I had composed, convert it to an audio format and store it as my ringtone. Simple and unique!
Problem 1: The version I have of Finale Notepad does not run even on my old laptop, and Finale no longer makes a free tool for Macs. I did have an old (but not quite as old) version of Finale Reader that would run on my old Mac, but it is an extremely crippled piece of software—it can play music out to the speakers and show the score on the screen, but that’s about it. I did confirm that I still had the music files, though and that some of them might make ok ringtones. That old laptop is pretty broken (wifi broken, SD card reader broken, hinge for screen broken), but it is the most recent Mac I have that would still run Finale freeware—everything else has been upgraded too much.
Success! There is still a Finale Notepad for Windows, and I do actually have a Windows machine in the house—a magenta HP laptop that I paid $75 for in order to test PteroDAQ on a Windows machine. My wife dubbed it the Barbie laptop, because of the color and the toy-like feel. I mainly use this laptop now for running pronterface to control my 3D printer, but when I was finished printing my second nose clip for a face mask, the laptop was free for other uses. I downloaded Finale Notepad to it and copied the score files (via flash drive) from the Mac to the Barbie laptop.
Success! Not only could I play the music score files on the Barbie laptop, but I could convert them to less proprietary formats: musicxml and MIDI. But these are still not audio files.
Problem 2: I tried playing one of the MIDI files on the Barbie laptop, but the result was terrible—Windows Media Player was not able to handle it. So I used the flash drive again to transfer the midi files to my new (early 2014) MacBook Air. Nothing on that machine plays MIDI files! I tried downloading some programs from the web, but they were either just ads asking for me to buy $100 software or non-functional. I removed all of them (I hope), and started looking for online converters. Based on what I had read—that Android phones handled all the standard music formats—I decided to look for converters from MIDI to M4A format.
Success! Zamzar.com provides such a converter. I tried a couple of files and the results were rather quiet, but seemed usable.
Problem 3: Zamzar.com only lets you convert two files a day, unless you pay them big bucks. I looked some more for other converters. I found one that crashed,
Success! I found one that worked: https://freeconvert.com/midi-to-m4a. I converted the files (twice, because I found I needed to fade the music in and out, which had not been necessary with Finale Notepad).
Problem 4: getting the files to my phone. The files were in my Dropbox, but I did not want Dropbox on my phone.
Success! I finally decided to use Google Drive for the transfer, as I already had Drive on the phone, and transferring the file from my computer to Drive and from Drive to my phone was straightforward.
Problem 5: the instructions I saw on the web suggested moving files into the RIngtones folder from the Downloads folder. This is harder than it might seem, because you have to go to the Downloads folder that is inside the internal storage in the Files app, not the crippled Downloads folder at the top that doesn’t let you move files.
Success! I got the m4a file into the Ringtones folder, and tapping it started the music playing!
Problem 6: The new ringtone did not appear as an option in my phone settings for ringtones. Not even after rebooting the phone (which some of the advice on the web said was needed with some Android versions).
Problem 7: I saw that it was possible to add ringtones directly from Drive, so I deleted the m4a file and tried adding the ringtone directly from Drive. Now the problem was that the file was greyed out—there were no selectable files. I’d been lied to about Android accepting all the music formats—sure it could play m4a files, but it couldn’t use them as ringtones.
Success! https://freeconvert.com/midi-to-mp3 converted the MIDI file into an mp3 file, which I could add as a ringtone from Google Drive using the Sound Settings on the phone.
So I now have a 35-second galliard of my own composition as my ringtone—it is definitely a unique ringtone, and may even have been worth the trouble it took to get it onto the phone. (And, no, I’m not going to play it for you on the blog.)
I have not put on a new ringtone for text messages, though, as a text ringtone needs to be very short, and the shortest piece I have is an 18-second single repetition of a bransle. I’ll have to think about what I can do for a 1-second or 2-second text ringtone.