Maria’s Guides

I just had to have the alarm clocks from Pink Floyd’s “Time.”

I’m not one of these people who likes loud, obnoxious ring tones on my phone. In fact, my phone is set to vibrate and then ring. My goal is to answer it before it makes a sound. But if it has to make noise, it may as well make a noise that I know is mine.

What I wanted was the sound of the alarm clocks from the beginning of Pink Floyd’s classic song, “Time,” from the amazing album, Dark Side of the Moon.

I poked around on the Web and found a few Web sites where that ringtone, cooked up by some user, was made available for free download. I listened to it. The sound cut in and out. I wanted a nice fade in and fade out so it sounded smooth. Apparently, I’d have to do it myself.

Editing the Sound

I started by putting a copy of “Time,” which I’d ripped years ago to iTunes from my own copy of the CD, on my Mac desktop in MP3 format. This would be my working copy.

Then I fired up Fission, Rogue Amoeba’s excellent audio editing application for Mac users. (If you’re a PC user reading this, you’ll need to find your own audio editing app; I can’t help you there.) I opened Time.mp3 into Fission, so it looked like this.

What you see in the big blue area is the sound waveform for the beginning of “Time” — the song, that is. The song doesn’t fade in — Dark Side of the Moon’s tracks all lead one into the other except between “Great Gig in the Sky” and “Money” because that’s where you had to flip the album (in the old days, of course). So the song starts with the end of the previous track, the rumbling of the crashed and presumably burning airplane. Within that rumble, you begin to hear the ticking clocks. Then, where the waveform gets fat, like an oval, the alarm clocks and various chimes start in. They fade out with just a few final chimes (those spikes after the big oval) and the drumbeat fades in. Then the big guitar notes come in.

You really need to know the piece to get what I’m talking about here. If you don’t have it, you should. Not only is the music great, but the words really have a message people should sit up and listen to. ‘Nuff said.

I wanted the big oval on the waveform with a fade in before it and a fade out after those chime spikes. So I used the split tool to click the waveform right before the guitar starts in as you see here. Then I used the Inspect tool to select the waveform on the right and pressed Delete to get rid of it, leaving me with just the part I wanted.

Next, I wanted to fade in the beginning of the piece. So I used the Select tool to select the first half of the rumbling + ticking clock section and clicked the Fade In button. I wanted the end of my clip to fade out, so I used the Select tool to select the last half of the final chimes and drumbeat section and clicked the Fade Out button. I played the whole thing through and was quite satisfied with the results.

I saved the entire piece as an MP3.

Converting the MP3 to a Ringtone

This is where I got a Treo ringtone education. Evidently, a Treo is picky about the format of its ringtones. It supports AAC format, but it has to be created with a certain type of compression — one I couldn’t seem to create. I wasted a lot of time trying, believe me.

So I turned to the Web, where I found a free ringtone converter for Palm OS. It’s called MiniTones and it’s by Nicolas Pabion. You can get it on the Freeware for Palm OS site.

MiniTones has some editing capabilities and it may meet your needs if you’re not interested in tracking down or paying for a good audio editing program. But I’m a perfectionist — at least sometimes — and wanted the fade ins and outs. MiniTones won’t do that for you.

MiniTones runs on the Treo — not on a computer. You download the file and double-click it to get it in your sync software. I use the Missing Sync; most people use Palm Desktop. Either way, get it in there and sync. It’ll be copied to your Palm.

You’ll also need to get the MP3 you created onto the Palm. Now here’s where it gets tricky. MiniTones will only work with music copied to a phone data card. I didn’t have one because I didn’t need one. Now I did, so I got one, stuck it in my Treo, and formatted it. Then I used the Missing Sync (or Palm desktop for most of you) to copy the edited MP3 to the card on my Treo.

Now it was just a matter of opening MiniTones on my Treo and using it to convert Time.mp3.

When I opened MiniTones, the Time.mp3 file appeared in a list of MP3s — in my case, it was the only file in the list. I toggled the check box, then tapped the Add Selected button.

In the Add Tone box, I changed the Save As name to just “Time” and tapped the Add button.

Next, I clicked the Sound Preferences button within MiniTones. I choose my new ringtone from the Known Caller list. I could also set the ringtone for other options, but I decided not to. I clicked done and I was finished.

Is It Worth It? It’s Up to You

Keep in mind that MP3-based ringtones aren’t for everyone. First of all, they take up a lot of space on your phone — over 700K in my case. Second, they’re lengthy, so you really don’t get to listen to the whole thing anyway. And it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they slowed down the operation of the phone.

But for me, it was worth the effort and the amount of memory the ringtone now occupies on my phone.