After I returned my iPhone, I went to the AT&T store to get another phone. I was about to get a BlackBerry, but I figures it had way too many buttons for me. My main criteria to buy a phone is that it has to be easy enough for me to text message myself when I’m drunk. Thus, I got a Samsung SYNC. It has big buttons, a big screen and it supports .mp3 files as ringtones, but you can only assign ringtone files (.mmf files) to alerts and alarms. In other words, I can use a song as a ringtone, but I was asked to shop for ringtones to be able to customize my alarms and alerts.
Since it’s always good to save some dough, I decided to make my own ringtone files (.mmf). If you ever had a problem opening something because you had a little dialogue box tell you that the “File type is not supported,” or something like that, then you would benefit from this blog.
The thing is that, the more peripherals and gadgets you have, the more you are required to know how to create files that your gadgets can read. That’s when codecs come in.
Codec stands for Compression/Decompression and for the sake of time, I will be blogging about audio codecs first and I’ll blog about video codecs and trends another time. Because I am a filmmaker, I use an extensive amount of tools to convert files into other files and I can be much more thorough with those later.
When I say music tracks or audio files, it’s all the same, really, because music, songs, sound effects are all interpreted the same way by a computer, so, if you have any bleep or blop you would like to mix into your own music and turn that into a ringtone, go ahead. Give it your best shot and have fun with it.
Extracting your music from your iPod/iPhone
My MacBook has been in and out of the shop all year and the last time I sent it in, they erased my hard drive and all my music. In order to get my music library back on track, I had to get my music out of my iPod. It’s your music, you should be able to get it back.
There are many tools and applications that extract or copy music files from an iPod, but I found that most of them rename the music tracks to something that makes no sense. Me being me, I was determined to find a way to get my music out of my iPod and preserve the names for my songs.
Making the best out of your music
Controlling Your Music
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Audio Hijack Pro has proven to be an user-friendly and solid recording tool. It is quite literally as if you had plugged in a high-quality digital audio recorder to your computer and recorded something. What makes Audio Hijack Pro unique is the fact that you can be working on an application and record from a different application. For instance, you can rule out the “blop” sound when you increase the audio in a Mac during an iTunes recording session.
Once you figure how to select an application and the “recording sessions” you can really make things a lot easier for you. It comes around $32.00 and its strip down version, Audio Hijack half that much. However, I do recommend the Pro version. It’s handy to have it around.
Creating your own ringtones
As I mentioned earlier, I had a hard time creating my own custom alerts and ringtones. I had to, somehow, convert my music files into .mmf files. I never heard of .mmf files before and I don’t even know what it stands for.
At any rate, I looked up tools to create custom ringtones and even those that you have to pay for were useless. There were too complicated to use and way too slow. Most of the applications I tested were built only for Windows.
So in my search I encountered two online file conversion tools. These are really the most comprehensive collection of file formats that don’t just limit itself to audio or video, but a plethora or file formats. I was amazed. Click had talked about online applications as a form of combating software piracy and these sites are a perfect example of online applications.
The first site is called Zamzar. Although it’s still in its beta stage, it does do the job and they have been adding more file formats every time I logged on.
After several attempts, I stumbled upon a nifty little application that is not that expensive and was well worth its cost. It’s called iPod Access and it costs $19.99 for either Mac or Windows. As a matter of fact, as I just found that out, iPod Access’ latest version, version 4.1, supports iPhones too. Yet another reason to get it.
iPod Access let’s you copy any music track(s) and also play it for you to make sure that’s the one you want. As opposed to all the other guys, the reason why I like this app is because it preserves al the name of the track, artist, genre and all that jazz. It also let’s you copy the selected song(s), or playlist, to a folder or straight to your iTunes library.
Recording protected music tracks
If you ever bought any songs off the iTunes Store, you must have realized that you can’t play it anywhere other than an iPod or iTunes itself. In the old days, all you had to do was to use either Quicktime or Final Cut to export to AIFF. But these days, to be able to convert these songs, it’s a little more complicated. You can do one of two things:
Both of these take quite a few steps and, if you only have a Mac, that’s what you got to do. If you have Windows, you have access to some other tools.
I highly recommend iPod Access and I have it on my “apps to keep” list. I just wish I was being paid to write these blogs.
The second file conversion site is Media-Convert and it too has an outstanding selection of file formats to convert to and from. Although Media-Convert is not in a beta stage, it does have numerous adds and banners that can clutter the view of the buttons you need to click on.
I was really impressed with the functionality of these sites. They are both free, but I have the feeling that Zamzar may become one of those subscribing sites.
Give any of them a try and take control of your music!
Although I’ve never really had the need to convert dozens of right-protected music into plain audio files, I have tried these methods and some Windows applications really do the trick. The reality is that it’s extra work regardless of what you do. It’s just easier to download the “borrowed” version of the songs you want. I suggest LimeWire for that.
The way I see it is that you have already paid for the rights to own that song, so you should be able to listen to it wherever you want.
Recently I found a nice recording tool that will not only allow you to record anything coming from iTunes as a live recording device but also allow you to record any audio from any application. In other words, if you find that you like a song that you found on someone’s MySpace profile and you cannot find it anywhere else, you can record that audio with this tool.
