Garage Band update brings free custom ringtones to the masses
Finally, our long national nightmare is over. For so long we’ve been forced into either buying our ringtones on iTunes at the outrrrrageous price of $1.99, using third-party apps like Ambrosia’s iToner, or other clever loopholes, to load our iPhone up with custom ringtones. But with the update to Garage Band 4.1.1, Apple’s finally made it possible for users to create their own custom ringtone.
The Garage Band update adds a a new item to the program’s Share menu, “Send Ringtone to iTunes.” When run, it compresses your composition down to a MPEG4 file and sends it over to iTunes where, unsurprisingly, it shows up in your Ringtones tab. A quick sync with the iPhone and, as Steve Jobs himself would say, boom: free, custom ringtone. One catch: as with the ringtone workaround, it has to be 40 seconds or less (Garage Band will give you a warning, otherwise). When you sync your iPhone, your new custom ringtone will appear—as if by magic—in the “Custom” section of Settings -> Sounds -> Ringtone.
The ringtone strategy was perhaps the most disheartening move that Apple had made in recent months, and it’s good to see that they’re providing an end-run around having to shell out more money to the record companies and cell phone providers.
[via The Mothership]
Category: Software
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Comments (9)
Woohoo! Finally!
Posted by Todd | December 14, 2007 12:22 PM
This is welcome news, but still a little odd. If Apple wants to enable its customers to make custom ringtones for their iPhone, why wouldn't they simply enable the iTunes ringtone editor to open non-iTunes files. It's a bit kludgy to require the user to do this work in Garageband and export the product to iTunes, when the editing capability is built into iTunes, isn't it?
Posted by iMatt | December 14, 2007 1:17 PM
i think they want 2 make it 4 mac users. cause garageband doesnt run on windows. and itunes does. yeah.
Posted by macgeekjew | December 14, 2007 6:57 PM
iMatt, it's called going after the low-hanging fruit.
It isn't all that hard - I just made a ringtone in less than ten minutes by converting an MP3 to AIFF (in iTunes), dropping said AIFF into GarageBand, slicing it up and voila!
But this simple set of steps is actually too much for many people, who would rather just plunk down two dollars to have it made super easy. That will be a sizable market for Apple.
Posted by Jon | December 14, 2007 8:27 PM
And so I have to spend $79 on GarageBand (if I had an iPhone & wanted "Apple-sanctioned" ring tones)? Hmm, methinks there's still a market for iToner.... ;-)
Posted by Kendall | December 14, 2007 11:25 PM
yeah but iTunes is free and Garage Band is not - apple is still making money out of all of us...
Posted by mfoto | December 15, 2007 10:50 AM
iMatt, The reason is because they expect you to use your own "beats" you make in garageband not necessarily actually songs, though thats what most of us will be doing, it is probably a workaround for them aswell as they cant really get in trouble for users using they're own beats.
Posted by Corey P | December 15, 2007 3:22 PM
Garage band is indeed free- it comes on macs.
Posted by matthew | December 18, 2007 12:10 AM
Matthew: It may be BUNDLED with Macs nowadays, but it's not free. As I said, it (well, iLife) is $79 if you want the ringtone ability...unless you have GarageBand 4 (required for the 4.1.1 update). But depending on when you bought your Mac, you might have no version of iLife--or have a version of GarageBand that can't be updated freely--and/or not find iLife worth buying.
Which is all fine! But that's why I said it's $79 and why I said iToner still has a market. ;-)
Posted by Kendall | December 19, 2007 12:33 AM