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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone System
What you need for this hint:
  1. Source of online sounds like the iTunes Music Store (iTMS).
  2. A way to capture the sounds: Wiretap Pro, RadioLover, Audio Hijack.
  3. A way to convert to MP3 format (if needed), such as Amadeus II.
  4. A Bluetooth cell phone that plays MP3 files as ringtones.
Just find the sound you want, at the iTMS or elsewhere. Play it and use Wiretap or equivalent to capture the sound. Edit to length, or add looping, effects, etc in Amadeus, and save as an MP3 file. It pays to drastically lower the quality of the sound (and the size of the file) since you won't hear "high quality" on the cell phone anyway.

Connect to the cell phone via Bluetooth using the Browse Devices entry under the Bluetooth menubar icon. Drag the MP3 file over to the cell phone and set it as your ring tone. For personal use, I believe this is legal :), and it is considerably cheaper than the ringtones my kids were downloading.

Of course, you can also make your own ringtones via Garageband, Reason, etc. There are probably ways to do this entire process with free software tools, but I just used what I had available, so I'll leave that for the comments.
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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone
Authored by: Frida's Boss on Jan 23, '06 10:01:09AM
Or you could just save time and the headache of all the capturing and conversion and go to WalMart.com and download their 30 second Mp3 previews.

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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone
Authored by: tobes on Jan 23, '06 01:18:12PM

Great idea. I currently use this technique to transfer snippets of old video game sountracks to my mobile phone to use as ringtones.



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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone
Authored by: SimonDorfman.com on Jan 31, '06 08:24:30AM
Using old video game audio is a great idea. There's a cool GUI for saving .WAV files from certain MAME roms: M1. There's a mac version linked from that site. If the .WAV files don't show up on your desktop, have a look in your root folder as discussed here.

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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone
Authored by: SimonDorfman.com on Jan 24, '06 06:20:50AM
For better quality, you can download the iTunes snippets directly, but it takes some command line know-how. basicallly, run tcpflow from the command line right before you preview a song in itunes. then stop the dump as soon as you start playing the song. Scroll to the top and figure out the url where the song lives.

$ sudo tcpflow -i en1 -c
tcpflow[683]: listening on en1
192.168.001.114.51557-069.045.079.145.00080: GET /Music/y2004/m08/d05/h17/s05.negqmhqy.p.m4p HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Cache-Control: no-cache
User-Agent: iTunes/6.0.2 (Macintosh; N; PPC)
Connection: close
Host: a1372.phobos.apple.com
From that, I figured out the song snippet lives at this url: http://a1372.phobos.apple.com/Music/y2004/m08/d05/h17/s05.negqmhqy.p.m4p

Track info, btw: Truckdrivin Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow Sweat) 2:55 Beck Mellow Gold $0.99

I'm sure it could be done with tcpdump also, but I've gotten in the habit of using tcpflow for some reason...

Writing a script to automate this would be cool. Probably beyond my abilities. Something like running the tcpdump command, pipe to grep, and somehow filter the output with regular expressions, construct the url and save the m4p file to your desktop with curl.



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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone
Authored by: Nathaniel Cross on Jan 24, '06 10:39:32AM

Here's a little command which I made a while ago:

[code]
sudo /usr/local/bin/tcpflow -c -i en0 port 80 | grep -oE '\<GET *.*\.m4p.*HTTP/1.1 *\>|Host: *.*'
[/code]

Paste this into a terminal and press enter. Every time you then click on a sample in iTunes the terminal will display the URL. Press Ctrl-C to stop it.

Change the m4p in the script to mov to grab movies



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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone
Authored by: SimonDorfman.com on Jan 31, '06 12:46:02AM
My perl hacker friend Dave Cash tackled this problem with me by writing a perl script. My only contribution is the hackish applescript contained therein. Here's the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$|++;
use strict;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use Audio::M4P::Decrypt;

my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
my $deDRMS = new Audio::M4P::Decrypt;

my $host  = '';
my $path  = '';
my $file  = '';
my $agent = '';
my $info  = '';

#figure out how to know which network interface is currenlty active, en1 or en0 etc
open TCPFLOW, "sudo tcpflow -c -i en0 port 80 |";
#when bundling this as an application with perlwrapper, maybe I can just include a binary of tcpflow and have the path to tcpflow be something like /Applications/iTunesStoreSnoop.app/Resources/tcpflow
while ( <TCPFLOW> ) {
	$path  ||= ( /GET *(.*?)[^\/]+\.m4p/ )[ 0 ];
	$file  ||= ( /GET *.*?([^\/]+\.m4p)/ )[ 0 ];
	$host  ||= ( /^Host: (.*?)[\n\r]*$/ )[ 0 ] if $path;
	$agent ||= ( /^User-Agent: (.*?)[\n\r]*$/ )[ 0 ];
	if ( $path && $host ) {
		if ( $agent =~ /^iTunes/ ) {

			# Use applescript and UI scripting to hackishly get the track name and title.  Returns something like this:
			# Song_Title	Track_Length	Artist	Album	Price
			# Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam (Live)	4:37	Nirvana	MTV Unplugged in New York: Nirvana	$0.99
			my $info = `osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to activate' -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "c" using {command down}' -e 'return the clipboard'`;

			my ( $title, $length, $artist, $album, $price ) = split /\t/, $info;
			my $out_filename = $title ? "$ENV{ HOME }/Desktop/$artist - $album - $title.m4p" : $file;
			print qq!Getting $file to "$out_filename"...!;
			
			my $response = $ua->get( "http://$host$path$file" );
               		if ( $response->is_success ) {
                      		open OUT, qq!> /tmp/$file!;
                       		print OUT $response->content;
                       		close OUT;
				rename "/tmp/$file", $out_filename;
				print "done.$/";
                       		#$deDRMS->DeDRMS( "/Users/simon/Desktop/$file", "/Users/simon/Desktop/DONE_$file" );
                       		#unlink "/Users/simon/Desktop/$file";
               		}
			else {
				print "failed!$/";
			}
		}
       		$host = $path = $file = '';
	}
}
close TCPLOW;
To use this script: save it somewhere as itunes.pl. In Terminal, cd to the folder where you saved it. Type this command perl itunes.pl. (You will probably need to install Audio::M4P::Decrypt from CPAN unless you already have it installed.) Once the script is running, go to iTunes and browse the music store. Each song you preview should be saved to the desktop. If you want to convert the protected AAC files to MP3, open hymn and process each file manually. It would be cool to make this script into a simple app using something like PerlWrapper. Then people who wanted to use it wouldn't have to know how to install CPAN or the command line. It could even include a binary of tcpflow so people wouldn't have to install that either.

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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone
Authored by: SimonDorfman.com on Jan 31, '06 01:25:46AM
P.S. - the script seems to not work quite right the first couple of songs it tries to download. But keep trying and it will work eventually. I don't know how to debug it, but maybe an adventurous perl programmer can take a look. Also, if the UI applescript part that copies the text from the iTunes current selection fails (because you changed applications just as it was about to copy, for example), the file will be save to the directory where you saved the script instead of the desktop and it will have the original name that iTunes stores it as (something like s05.ypqjdnud.p.m4p). I saved this applescript:

tell application "Terminal"
	activate
	tell application "System Events"
		keystroke "n" using command down
		delay 1
	end tell
	set bounds of window 1 to {0, 22, 1280, 854}
	do script "cd ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/iTunes/" in window 1
	do script "perl itunes.pl" in window 1
end tell
...to ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts/Save Music Store Previews to Desktop.scpt so I can easily start up the perl script from the iTunes script menu.

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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone
Authored by: johnzy on Jan 24, '06 06:46:59PM

I did this with my Nokia -- put a big memory card in it, used bluetooth to send (legal, that I had purchased) tunes to the phone. Piece of cake. The player is no itunes for sure, but it works. Then if I want to use a song for a ringtone, I pick about a 40-second slice using an editing app and select it as the ringtone. Everytime it rings, I get requests for people to help me do it with their phones. Rarely do they have the right gear. There's an opportunity here for businesses to do-right and make it easy for people to enjoy their FAIR USE rights. Will I ever pay for a ringtone? Of a tune I already own? Nope.



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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone
Authored by: dample21 on Oct 29, '06 08:35:32PM

when i try to connect to my razr,(verizon wireless) it says my device does not have the necessary services......what do i do?



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Use any song snippet as a cell phone ringtone
Authored by: nash0205 on Sep 12, '07 01:00:17PM

many thank Nathaniel Cross

it is awesome



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