I love the new phone that Recliner Man gave to me. It is an LG EnV2. The only thing that was making me sad about retiring my old phone were all the special ringtones that I had downloaded onto it. All my special people had their own special sounds. I looked into downloading the ringtones onto my new phone but at $2 to $3 a pop I was hesitant to get too many. The worst part was that all my favorites weren’t available anymore. I felt there had to be a way to get around the high price and limited options. I just didn’t know what it was. Time to turn to the internet.

Thanks to Google I found terminal23 and learned that there was a way to get my own ringtones loaded onto the LG EnV2. The comments on this post led me to the sound editing program WavePad which I could use to turn MP3s into ringtones. A posting by Dale Higgs gave me the help I needed to figure out how to use WavePad.

Just in case some of you own the EnV2 I’m going to share the directions for making and loading your own ringtones. It’s a great way to customize your phone and save a bit of money. It might even make your son proud enough to call you a hacker.

The first thing I did was go to Youtube and find the music that I wanted. My son-in-law said that I should use the theme from Zelda for his ringtone. He is a Geek.

I copied the Youtube URL and headed over to  vidtomp3.com. This site has a nifty converter that will turn the audio from Youtube into an MP3 that you can download.

With my MP3 in hand I was ready to use WavePad. Thanks to Dale Higgs I was able to figure it out quickly. Start off by opening the MP3 file in WavePad by dragging and dropping it into the open program. Play the song using the control buttons at the bottom to decide what section you would like to use as your ringtone. You will be chopping out a section that is 30 seconds or less. Since your phone will only ring for about 20 seconds before sending the caller to voicemail, this will be long enough.

While the song is playing watch as the bar moves across the wave pattern. When you think you know what part of the song you want click on the position where it starts, then click and drag to the right, stopping a short distance beyond the section you want. I like to highlight a slightly larger section that I plan to use and fine tune my cut later on. Now hit CTRL+T to trim away everything but the section you highlighted.

At this point you are working with a smaller file and it is easier to pinpoint exactly where you want your ringtone to start and stop. Go ahead and repeat the process until you have a 20 to 30 second section picked out.

If you want the ringtone to fade out at the end  click on Effects and then Fade Out.

Save your ringtone as a WAV file, selecting the Microsoft ADPCM 22.050 khz, 4 bit Mono attributes.

You now have a ringtone file but you are only halfway through the process. You still need to get the file onto your phone and saved as a ringtone.

To load the file onto your phone you will need a micro SD card and reader. My computer lacks a card slot so I also needed a converter drive that plugs into the USB port. The microSD and card reader cost me about $15 and the converter drive was about $12.

You will need to install the microSD into your phone first and format it. Once that is done you can plug it into your computer and transfer the ringtone WAV file into the folder named MY SOUNDS. Then put the microSD card back into the phone.

Now open the phone and press OK to enter the menu. Select 5 Media Center, 1 Music & Tones, 5 My Sounds. Scroll down to highlight your new file and select Options. Select Send, and send this to yourself as a text with attached file.

When the text message arrives open it. When the music starts to play select Options and  Save As Ringtone.

That’s it. You now have a custom ringtone for a fraction of the cost of downloading a ringtone.