For those of you with Garage Band and all its super powerful tools, why would you bother spending money on a ringtone maker for your iPhone? Well, maybe you wouldn't and maybe you'd want to make a ringtone on the fly. Or maybe you don't have a Mac, or maybe Garage Band intimidates you with all its buttons and knobs. Is there an idiot proof way to make ringtones? You betcha!

 

Ringtone Designer Pro ($0.99)

BLACKOUT LABS' Ringtone Designer Pro is just a buck and it lets you create an unlimited number of ringtones. You can select anything you've added to your iPhone, as long as it's not a DRM-protected file, and you're presented with a simple interface. Tap on the song and it loads into the editing screen.

 

 

Easy to Get Started, Easy to Use

Here the song wave file is spread out before you in blue and gray and you can either tap and drag the song around or tap the arrows to move in .2 second increments. Slider buttons allow you to lengthen or shorten your selection up to 40 seconds and down to 6. A button at the top of your selector field adds a fade to the beginning and end of your track -- a definite improvement over a sudden jarring note of music.

Beneath your song wave is a ginormous play button that lets you preview your ringtone. Press Save and that's it -- for now. Should you choose to make your own ringtone, a microphone button in the upper right hand side turns you into a field recordist. Everything is obvious, and the controls are well designed enough that simplicity rules.

 

We Didn't Care for This Kind of Minor Annoyance/Extortion

The real trick comes once you save the song. After you create your ringtone, you can watch a short YouTube tutorial on how to get the ringtone file out of the app, into iTunes, and back into your iPhone in the proper location. You can't add it to your ringtone catalog from the app alone.

Slick, simple, and helpful, Ringtone Designer Pro does just what you want and nothing more.

 

Ringtone Maker Pro ($0.99)

 

Zentertain will charge you that same dollar for Ringtone Maker Pro, but you get much more bang for the buck. To get started, tap the Select a song button from the app's opening page and choose.

 

Every App Had This Song Screen

The app then takes you to the editing page which is a bit more techy than Ringtone Designer's. The song wave pattern is replaced with a slider row for the starting point and a slider row for the length of the ringtone (again as long as 40 seconds and as short as 6). A button for fading in and out is there, but the real magic comes with the Advanced button.

 

Plenty of Control Here

Set to Off as its default, the Advanced features button reveals the app's hidden powers. Here you can perform custom editing to your ringtone. Like silly songs? Use the Speed buttons to double the speed of your ringtone. Or slow it down for some thick drawling molasses. Maybe speed isn't really your bag. The Pitch button lets you make deep voiced men sound like high pitched little girls and vice versa. Use both buttons for maximum comical effect. Don't want to fiddle that much or want to see a test of this in action? Ringtone Maker Pro also comes with five custom presets.

In the upper right hand corner you get a microphone option for making your own sounds (then tweaking them below), though we found that playback after recording was tinny and tiny in the editing stage. However, playback as ringtone was fine, no worries.

Tap the save button, Ringtone Maker sends it off and it too gives you a help screen with buttons. Tap Back to go back and make more; tap Send to share this ringtone by email; tap Help and the app opens a page in Safari where you can choose multilingual text and image based instructions or a YouTube video.

 

Easy Instructions Make Everything a Snap

Don't want the advanced features? Fine, Ringtone Maker sports a free version that will trim songs, but not let you speed them up. We suspect for most people that that'll be just fine.

 

Ringtone Maker (by Mobile17) ($0.99)

Mobile17's eponymous Ringtone Maker (by Mobile17) follows its peers by charging a dollar. While the app advertises that it's based on technology from the web site of the same name, we couldn't quite gather what that technology was.

Once you choose a song, the app offers up helpful user suggestions for good points in the song to make a ringtone. You can preview these selections, but if you don't like the proffered choices, you can always tap the "No matching songs?" button to edit the song to your liking.

 

 

Gives You Some Advice On Edits

At the editing page, you can choose where the song starts and how long it is and that's it. No fading, no pitch adjustment, nothing extra, unless you count being able to make a ringtone of exactly one second extra. Even the song wave field is just a coppery bar with an minuscule wave form on it. A Play button lets you preview and a big Create Ringtone saves the file.

 

Not Much in the Editing Deparment

Our biggest complaint came down to this. Between the pay version and the free version, the only difference we noticed was the absence of advertising. That hardly seems worth a dollar to us, while kicking up the feature set strikes us as far more value.

 

Ring, Ring, Ring: Destiny Calls

This one came down to a pretty clear gold medal (Ringtone Maker Pro), silver medal (Ringtone Designer Pro), and bronze medal (Ringtone Maker (by Mobile17)). For the same price as the rest, Ringtone Maker Pro gives you advanced features but in a lovely touch, they're not turned on to clutter up the screen unless you choose it.

 

We can't find a fault with the app save one that dogs every app of this kind. As long as Apple insists so strongly on iTunes (i.e., forever) there's no way to make a ringtone and start immediately using it. Not until you get home and plug your iPhone in and download and all that. Not the apps' fault, but a real hindrance against on the go ringtone use.