How to: Shrink MP3s to use as ringtones

If your phone can use MP3s as ringtones but you’re a bit tight for space on your memory card (and can’t face reinstalling everything on a bigger card), there is a quick ‘n’ easy way of shrinking down the tracks using Apple’s iTunes.

You might know that in iTunes you can set the sampling rate at which it converts your CDs to MP3s (or other formats). Changing these settings can make a big difference to the size of your MP3 files – and it’s this feature we’re going to be covering here.

To begin with, you need to go into your iTunes preferences and click on the ‘Advanced’ section, then on the ‘Importing’ tab. Here you’ll see your settings for importing and converting your CDs. Apple sets these to create 128kbit AAC files as standard, although we prefer the sound of 192kbit MP3s. Anyway, if you click on the drop-down for ‘Setting’ you’ll see a ‘Custom’ option – choose this.

Now you need to change the following options (but make a note of the original settings before you start):

Stereo Bit Rate: set to ‘128kbps’
Channels: set to ‘Mono’

These settings aren’t much use if you want to listen to the file as a music track, but for a ringtone they’re absolutely fine – remember your handset only has a tiny mono speaker. You just don’t need the sound quality contained in a bigger file.

Now click ‘OK’ and go back to the main iTunes music browser. Right-click the song that you want to convert (or go to ‘Advanced’ in the top menu bar) and choose ‘Convert Selection to MP3′. This will start re-sampling your file to the new settings.

You don’t need to worry about the original file being over-written – iTunes will create a new duplicate file. When it’s done, use right-click again (or hold down ‘ctrl’ and click if you’re using a Mac with a one-button mouse) on the new song file and choose ‘Show in Finder’ or ‘Locate on disk’ (we can’t remember what it says on PC). Once you’ve found it, use either Bluetooth or your USB cable to send the new file to your handset, and away you go.

We found that this process usually reduces our MP3s to about 33% of their original size, which is a pretty big saving (4.5MB drops down to 1.5MB) and they still sound great as a ringtone.

Oh – and remember to change your iTunes settings back before you convert any more CDs, otherwise they’ll end up as 64kbit mono MP3s!