Microsoft today provided an informative post on the Windows Phone Blog describing how the next release of the OS, codenamed Mango, will support custom ringtones. Which is to say, it won’t: The support is in there, but there’s no built-in UI for custom ringtones. So you’ll have to get a third party app for that or make your own.
In Mango, we’re giving developers the tools [for custom ringtones] … I expect to see a burst of ringtone-related apps in Marketplace. Without getting too technical, that’s because of new under-the-hood changes we’ve made that make it possible for developers to build ringtone apps and also add ringtone-related features to existing ones.
But we know many of you have a particular ringtone in mind—or sounds files already on your PC that you’d like to turn into one. In Mango, we give you the flexibility to do this yourself—with some important caveats. To qualify as a ringtone, a sound file must be:
- 39 seconds or shorter
- smaller than 1 megabyte (MB)
- saved in MP3 or WMA format
- not copy-protected (i.e. DRM free)
This post isn’t intended to be a tutorial on creating custom ringtones (we’ll cover that in more detail once Mango is available), but I wanted to provide a flavor for how it will all work.
In short, custom ringtones can be installed using the Zune software on your PC. Once you’ve created an audio file that meets the ringtone requirements, find it in your Zune music collection, right-click the file, and change the Genre field to Ringtone. Then just sync the file to your phone like you would any music track.
Don’t worry: items marked Ringtone won’t show up in your phone’s music collection—so there’s no need to fear that during a workout you’ll suddenly hear your dog barking or other homemade ring. Instead, you’ll see them in Ringtones + Sounds in Settings, under a new Custom category we’ve created.
So, better than nothing of course. Oddly enough, Rafael and I recently tried to experiment with different sound files to see whether this would secretly work exactly as described above. But we didn’t get it to work. Maybe the file sizes were just a bit too big, or we don’t have the right version of the Zune PC software, or whatever.
Why isn’t there a way to use the songs in your library as the ringtone. Is it so difficult to do that?
They’re too long, for starters. You could edit the song yourself and then add it as a ringtone.
Do you know if they will actually add Custom themes in Mango instead of just solid colors?
Not that I know of.
For the love of…
It seems as if they’ve really gone out of their way on this one. I doubt they had to make it this complicated and artificially limited but you have to give them credit, they really put their backs into building their little system.
Of course, since I like to just set a song as my ringtone, almost always longer than 39 seconds and larger than 1 MB, I don’t mind it showing up in my music collection. In fact, I’d love to just browse my music collection and select any of the songs right from there.
I suppose this is better than nothing. The way one piece of crippled functionality that isn’t what you wanted is better than a different piece of crippled functionality that isn’t what you wanted.
I have to wonder how the largest software maker in the world can’t do something my feature phone could 4 years ago. I think this is an attempt to allow appmakers to make money for the short amount of time that it takes some 100 free apps to be around. yet I hate apps for things my phone should do out of the box. If I wanted an app to fill in basic functionality gaps I would have bought an android.
I wish every OS would prevent using songs as ringtones. It’s so annoying. I don’t want to hear a phone play some Katy Perry song in entirety because they left their phone at their desk and ran to the bathroom and someone called while they’re gone. You won’t see me setting a random death metal song as mine. I think literally every possible feature a phone could have is more important than custom ringtones. Custom ringtones are the cell phone equivalent of autoplay songs and sparkly gif’s on myspace. Fortunately one of those has died off.
In most cases I would expect the call to go to voice mail long before Katy Perry finishes singing, though I admit I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her songs and maybe they’re usually under a minute in length. I’d guess most of the songs are longer though but I’m not sure it’s less annoying to have to hear the same 39 seconds repeat than it is to let the song play out in case the caller actually let’s it ring for 3 minutes and voice mail never does kick in.
I have a hard time seeing how the simple convenience of being able to pick any song in one’s library to be the ringtone, alarm or what have you, on the fly could be seen as something so potentially annoying that it would warrant this current setup.
People will have terrible taste in ringtones, some will count you as one of those people and some will certainly count me among them. I fail to see however how making us edit our prospective ringtones down to 39 seconds using special software before transferring it back to a special location on the phone would in any way help the situation.
Ringtones will still annoy, just in shorter snippets and only after having annoyed the one person whom we can reasonably assume wouldn’t otherwise have been annoyed by having them jump through unnecessary hoops to set it.
Pingback: » A New Ringtone Challenger Appears Greg Hurlman, Developer.
I’d like to point out that with Final Cut X Apple has shown that they even steal the way they disappoint their users from other people, shine them up, and present them as new. As proof I present how my Samsung Focus still does not have all the functionality of my WM6.5 phone and, apparently, MS is looking for developers to fill the void.
*sigh*
For some reason, your link generates a “group not found”. Search the blog site for Mango, however, and this http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2011/06/28/ringing-in-mango.aspx is at the top of the list, and works. (scratches head)
Its funny.. the Symbian I used years ago could set songs as custom ringtone. It was simple and straightforward, right click and use as ringtone. If you look at the WP7 facebook page (its actually useless) every dumb customer (none techie) who got WP7 is asking for the custom ringtone ability and it amazes me to see WP7 team implement it in such a convoluted manner.
Just another way of screwing up the customer experience. Unless you are a techie or someone who digs into things to figure out stuff you cannot figure out the guidelines BS.
PocketNow has a walk-through on how to make a custom ringtone. After you choose “Ring Tone” in Zune, you have to delete the space and make it one word, “Ringtone”
Pingback: Episode 024 – “International Flavored Mango” | windows phone dev podcast