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I re-did my ringtones today. I last worried about them May 8, 2004, but this time I got a little fancier. First, the list:

Carey       - Amazed
Golf/Work   - Forest for the Trees
Friends     - Good Intentions
Family      - We are Family
General     - You Can Call Me Al

Those are the groups, of course, and each has its own ringer now. General is the catch-all, and I was looking for songs that had "call me" in the title. I like the Paul Simon tune, so, why not? "We are Family" is from the 1979 Pirates team, and has "family" in it. Good ol' Sister Sledge song. "Good Intentions" makes it as a Toad the Wet Sprocket song, one of my favorite bands, and because it's from the Friends soundtrack. "Forest for the Trees" is from the Fore! album by Huey Lewis & the News, and forests and trees come into play when golfing quite frequently. As for Carey and "(Maybe I'm) Amazed," well, that's our song. Logical choice.

Every one of the songs was brought through GarageBand. I trimmed the length of the song, then added volume fades where needed (into, out of) to get ringtones that ranged from 15 to 45 seconds in length. I exported the .aiff to iTunes where I further adjusted the start time as necessary (GarageBand doesn't seem to let me trim from the start - just from the end with the purple triangle, and if it does I didn't care to find out, as the iTunes solution was good enough).

Some of the songs are ones I had purchased from the iTMS, so I first rolled those into iMovie along with the Tiger intro movie. I unchecked the soundtrack for the Tiger Intro movie, exported via QuickTime "Movie to AIFF," and brought the tracks into GarageBand. iMovie won't let you export a protected soundtrack only, so this work-around garners the same results with minimal extra effort. Any length video track will do.

In iTunes, I converted the songs to 128 kbps (stereo), joint stereo tracks. They play on my Motorola V555 quite nicely, though I may try a lower bitrate and I may try bumping up the volume a little.