Make MP3 and MIDI Ringtones

And now what you've all been waiting for: how to turn your favorite song into a ringtone and upload it to your phone, all for free. For this guide, you'll need to use BitPim. Here's my tutorial on how to set up BitPim, if you haven't already done so.

This tutorial is especially useful for VX8300 owners, but it should work for many other models that are BitPim compatible as well. I say that it is especially useful for VX8300 owners because LG (or more likely Verizon) made it somewhat difficult for a user to add ringtones to their phone by themselves. It can only be done with a specialized tool, like BitPim. I repeat, you cannot added ringtones to your VX8300 merely by adding them to some directory on your microSD card, they must be inserted directly into your phone's memory with BitPim. That said, let's begin...

We'll start with adding MIDI ringtones. MIDIs are like digital sheet music that tell your computer or phone how to play a song. MIDIs of many popular songs from old to new can be found for free on the internet.

1. Open BitPim and connect it to your phone.
2. Click on the plus sign next to "Media" on the BitPim tree, and then click "ringers" beneath it.
3. Drag your MIDI files into the large white pane on the right.
4. Now click the Green Arrow Pointing to the Cell Phone button, select ringtones, hit OK, and wait for the transfer. That's all there is to it, check your "My Ringtones" menu on your VX8300 to see if it worked.

Creating an MP3 ringtone for your phone is a little more involved, as you'll typically need to edit the file down to the short clip that you want as a ringtone. Fortunately, BitPim makes this very easy by providing a simple MP3 editor. (For more advanced audio editing capabilities, I highly recommend Audacity, which is free software.)

1. Drag your MP3 into the ringers pane, as you would for a MIDI. A simple editor/converter appears.
2. Press convert to convert your audio into the appropriate format for editing. As you practice making more MP3 ringtones, you'll want to start fiddling with the available options before you convert to improve the quality of your ringtones. A higher bitrate raises audio quality at the expense of greater file size, for instance.
3. When conversion is complete, you'll wnat to cut the song down to the chunk you want to hear as a ringtone. The blue-grey bar represents the whole length of the song. Drag the pink and red sliders to the beginning and end of the area you want to use. Click play clip as you go to hear the selected area.
4. After this, you may want to boost the volume of the clip. The VX8300 has a tendency to play homemade ringtones at volume slightly quieter than the supplied ones. Do this by adding a positive value to the decibel (dB) volume adjustment box. Experiment with the amount on different attempts, but remember that the more you increase the volume, the more distortion will be introduced to the clip. I've found 5db to be a rather happy compromise between loudness and distortion.
5. Press OK when you're done, let it do its thing, and upload it to your phone, same way as the MIDI.

Kudos, you can now go out into the world and annoy people with your taste in music everytime you receive a phone call. Remember, if you're having trouble with connecting to your phone, see my guide on how to configure BitPim.

Want to make your phone even easier to use? Read my tutorial on VX8300 shortcuts.