Custom ringtones on iPhone - yuck!

Ever since I got an iPhone, I've been badly missing having my favorite songs as ringtones. So recently, when I googled 'custom ringtones iphone' and found an Apple article describing how I could have a custom ringtone on my iPhone, I was very excited.

I tried it out. Dragged my song from iTunes and dropped it in Garage Band. Selected a 40 second portion, clicked the 'cycle' button and clicked on Share->Export as ringtone to iTunes. Voila! I had a new ringtone in iTunes.

I then synced my iPhone using iTunes. As expected, the ringtone got copied over and I could choose the ringtone in the Sounds section of Settings on my iPhone.

The next time I got a call however, I was appalled. The audio quality was so bad, it was embarassing. I quickly took the call before too many people around me could realize the sound was coming from my iPhone!

I quickly changed my ringtone back to the default 'Old Phone' ringtone.

When I got home I decided to dig a little deeper. Was something wrong with my iPhone speaker? I played some songs from my playlists. They sounded just fine. I played the ringtone in Garage Band. That sounded good too. Even in iTunes, the ringtone sounded good. Only when I sent it over to the iPhone the sound was bad.

I was disappointed.

I then googled around for this and finally found this article that claimed to have a solution for this very problem. I got excited again.

I knew the procedure described in the rest of the article. But steps thirteen and fourteen looked like the solution to my problem.

I reopened my Garage Band project that had the ringtone and did those steps - basically filtering out sounds below a certain frequency which was supposed to take care of the distortions in the ringtone.

I played the tone in Garage Band. Sounded fine. Exported to iTunes. Played it there. Sounded fine. Ok, I said, here goes and synced the iPhone. Played it in iPhone by selecting it in the Settings.

Yuck! As bad as before.

This was a huge disappointment.

What is the point in having a ringtone that sounds so bad? And it beats me about why a ringtone sounds so bad when the original song I've taken the ringtone from plays so well on the iPhone.

Comments

Aditya Jandial said…
Hey... Try the iPhone ringtone maker. It costs about 25 USD but I assure you its a small price to pay..
Anonymous said…
I've got the same problem: ringtone sounds great in GarageBand and iTunes, but lousy when played on the iPhone. The original song, from which the tone was made, plays just fine on the iPhone. The iPhone speakers have a buzzing sound at certain points. Those points are neither the lowest of the bass nor the highest of the trebles. And the buzzing points aren't the loudest parts of the song either, nor even as loud as other songs when played. (I saw all the same articles you did and tried their "solutions".)