Make Your Own Ring Tones for the Quickfire

So I recently researched and picked up a new phone from AT&T- the Quickfire. I had read that it was possible to set up ring tones for the phone, but couldn't really find any instructions about it. In fact, I saw a bunch of people complaining about the lack of instruction! Once I got the phone, I actually bought my first ring tone as I didn't have time to figure out how to make mine. $2.50. Seriously? What a freaking ripoff. So the next day, I sat down, and I figured this thing out. Now, I get to walk you through the steps so you don't have to shell out $2.50 per ring tone yourself.

First, go download this music editor. You're going to need it. Oh, don't worry, it's free. I wouldn't have you buy a music editor just for making ring tones.

Now, you're going to need to pick a song. Whatever song you pick can be in any format that is not protected. So if you have protected WMA format, you're going to need to get an unprotected copy of that song. If you buy a song from iTunes, same thing. Now you can actually make an MP3 ringtone in iTunes, but it will cost you $.99. Of course, it will be slightly easier, but meh, just get an unprotected copy of the song. Save yourself a buck.

Okay. Now we are ready to begin.

1. Take your song and open it in WavePad. You can select the part of the song that you want. You're going to want it to be between 15-18 seconds long. 20 seconds makes the file too big.

2. Once you have the right amount of the song selected, you can copy or cut it (but don't save the original file or else you might have accidentally cut part of your song out!).

3. Open a new file and paste the clip in. Go ahead and fix up the clip if you need to.

4. Now save the NEW file- and this is important- as an MP3 file. Doesn't really matter where at this point. You can play around with the settings for the sound quality, but you'll want to leave them a bit higher so the ring tone doesn't sound too cheap and tinny.

5. Once the file is saved, check the properties of it. It must be under 300 KB in size.

6. Ok, now save it to your micro-SD card.

7. Throw your SD card in your phone. Try to set it as your ringtone. If you did everything correctly, you will have a free ringtone with the song you want and, more importantly, the part of the song you want.

I'll throw up better instructions later as I have more time. I'll also throw up a video of the software being used. I forget the exact folder that the ringtone goes in, but I'll post it later with the video update.