Kyocera Lingo - Make Your Own Ringtones
Update: Heather points out below that you can actually email the ringtone right to your phone instead of this whole crazy sequence. If it works, sweet-- I'll have to try it. Just mail the mp3 as an attachment to your phone, like an MMS message. In my case it would be xxxyyyzzzz@mms.mycricket.com, different providers I am sure will be different. In any case, thank you to Heather!
Just a quick tutorial today, there is no Mobile Phone Tools (yet) for the Lingo M1000, and sort of by accident I found a way to put my own ringtones on my Lingo.
First off, it may only work on Cricket, but it should work on any Lingo with a web browser.
Creating the ringtone:
I'm sure there are better tutorials out there for this, but I used the free Audacity. Simply take in your mp3 of choice, trim it down to your favorite 30 seconds, use the high-pass filter to drop everything below 100Hz (the ringer can't really pump out the bass), and then use the default dynamic-range compression. Mix it down to a single mono track, and save as a 22KHz, 64kbps mp3. The total file size needs to be under about 500K.
Getting the Ringtone into the Lingo
You'll need a website of some sort to upload the mp3 too, any free service will do, but the key is, there needs to be a direct URL to your mp3. If you can't think of something easier, HotLinkFiles will work. Note the complete URL for the mp3. Enter the URL (using the handy QWERTY keyboard) into the web browser, and wait a minute for it to download. It will ask if you want to save the mp3 in your 'Sounds' directory-- you do.
Activating the Ringtone
Just navigate into your 'Media Gallery', then 'Sounds' and then 'Saved Sounds'. Your new mp3 should be at the top of the list, but find it and press 'Options' and then 'Assign'. From there you can make it the default ringer or whatever you like.
So it's not the smoothest way to get a ringtone, but it works, and I miss my old Nokia 6265i...