Create Ringtones with Free Automator Application
My buddy was in town this past week on tour with his band, and he wanted to hang out. He was excited to show me a new way to make a ringtone in iTunes. I suggested he just use Garageband, but he thought that his way was cooler and made him look like a computer genius. It took him a good 5 minutes to remember all the steps for creating the ringtone, but by the time I finished my coffee, he had his incoming calls blazing Matisyahu’s “King Without a Crown”.
Though I wouldn’t suggest using my friend’s manual method over Garageband, I was able to squeeze the actions into a quirky little Automator application that some MacApperbottoms may find useful.
So step by step, here’s what to do:
- Download this festively titled Automator application.
- Find a song in iTunes worth ringtoning.
- Set your preferred duration for the ringtone (get info on selected song).
- Run the Automator application. If your current encoder is set to AAC, then click OK. If it’s on another setting, set it to AAC in the popup, click Continue and restart the Automator application.
- This time your encoder will be set to AAC. Click Continue and choose the song you want to convert to a ringtone.
- This will drop a ringtone file on your desktop. Here’s where the glitchy part is. Open this file from the desktop. iTunes will identify the file currently in the library.
Delete the file that iTunes identifies, then reopen the file from the desktop to deposit the file in the ringtone library.
Automator is one of the many underused stock OS X applications. Who knows, maybe this application will encourage you to check out how Automator apps can make your Mac life easier. All that to say, feel free to comment with an easier (free) alternative to this Automator application.
Or you could just use Audiko, its a super simple online interface and offers a direct download of the m4r files.
Enjoy!
Same features on Nakko.com with the addition of syncing your choices and uploads directly to iTunes as a podcast.
Thanks James and Louis for those site suggestions.
Very cool how you can download premade ringtones from the site.
But I would rather make my own either on the site or on my desktop. I tried a couple and they were botched jobs.
Cheers,
Tim
Does it work in leopard? I am getting error message. it says The action “choose Encoder” could not be loaded because it could not be located.
Also when i opened the package work flow calls for another action” convert tracks” which is also not there in my automator actions. Am I missing some thing?
Tim,
I had the same problem. I discovered that you just needed to install those two automator actions.
http://automatoractions.com/files/chooseencoder1.0.html
and
http://automatoractions.com/files/converttracks1.0.html
Download, unzip, open the files to install the actions into Automator. Then run Ring-a-ding-ding and you’re golden.
Me, too! Same deal with the missing actions. Can someone please help?!
ps-Tiger 10.4.11
Make your ringtone more special. Just choose a this one,satisfy your need.
Don’t hesitate.Just try.
works great for me thank you for this great article!
The ring ding ding Link is down.