Saturday 17 October 2009

Make or transfer ringtones to IPhone

I have a few ringtones Ive been using for years, across many phones. And I am now very tuned into them.

It was therefor quite annoying to find out that IPhone does not allow you to simply transfer them directly to it from my Nokia N95.

A bit of googling I found out that Apple deliberately bars this.
A bit more of googling I found out how to circumvent this restrictions.

Basically I followed this:

and this


And you do not have to jailbrake your phone, nor pay for software. The software used is simply a free well established audio sampling program.

Here is a breakdown:

  1. Transfer ringtone to PC (a windows box this time) from old phone. By bluetooth, email, Nokia's filebrowser etc (I located them via the phones file browser and emailed them as my desktop dont have the cable nor bluetooth)
  2. Install Audacity v 1.3+
  3. Install Lame for Audacity
  4. Install FFMPeg for Audacity
  5. Launch Audacity and locate audio file
  6. (You can copy into new file, edit etc if you want, but dont overwrite your original ringtone/song)
  7. Go to File/Export
  8. Enter details if desired, and choose m4a(ffmpeg)as export file type.
  9. Exit Audacity and locate new file in windows explorer
  10. Rename extension from m4a to m4r
  11. Open ITunes, and drag file from explorer into your library
  12. Sync and voila!

Friday 9 October 2009

Twittering Blog

I used to write blog entries more often, whenever I had something on my mind that I wanted to rant about. Although prevously never a frequent blogger , lately I have blogged less and less.

Why? Twitter.

Before I would write pages and pages of mostly repeating rants. Now I restrict it to one twitter tweet (or two). And quite frequently...

But my long rants are now gone, or very rare. Maybe that is a good idea.



So what if any are the pros and cons of this "evolution":


Pros:
* My blog is not filled with rants.
* I twitter a lot.
* My rants are to the point, not filled with reiterated jibberish.
* My grievances are shared with more people.


Cons:
* I twitter too much?
* I rant more often.
* My blog is never updated.
* My twitter rants have no detail, or reflection.
* The threshold to rant is lower, and often rant needlessly, before I can rethink and research my issue.


And I presume this has happened for other people as well.

Funny, since the people behind [1] [2] blogger are some of the founders of twitter. Killing their own lovechild?