Droid Lessons

The advent of widespread mobile phone ownership in the early 00s brought about numerous changes to the culture of the society in which we live: people could more easily contact one another when away from their dedicated home phones; they could communicate without necessarily talking by texting; and they could customize their notification experiences by setting custom tones.

Though the mobile computing experience has evolved to become even more customizable with smart phones and tablets, some people still rock their devices as personal jukeboxes set to play their favorite songs and sounds for the world at large. And for that purpose, having access to an application that can help you in your endeavor to entertain the masses is still certainly relevant.

To satisfy that need, Ringtone Slicer Beta, recently released by developer Sergey Otro, is the app for the job. Slicer features a clean, minimalist design and interface based on those oh-so-important Holo design guidelines and straightforward, easy-to-use functionality. While the app is still in beta, Otro appears to be an active developer committed to creating a quality, ultimately feature-rich app that, according to its Play Store description, will always remain free to use.

Before we begin, you want to ensure that you have the sound file you wish to edit somewhere on your device. I transferred an mp3 of “Someone’s in the Wolf” by Queens of the Stone Age onto the internal storage of my Nexus 7 to start the process. Note that if you use Google’s Play Music and you have songs “pinned” to your device, you will not be able to access them for this purpose. Also note that while I used an mp3 for the purposes of this demonstration, Slicer also supports wav, aac, and amr files.

First, open the app and select a storage folder.

As you can see from the screenshot above, mine is the “sdcard” folder. Then select the folder in which your sound file is located.

Once you select the file, Slicer will prepare it for editing.

The tall, darker grey box which appears over the visual representation of the sound file is adjustable and can be moved to the section of the file you want to use as the tone. Simply touch and hold the triangle in the bottom, right-hand corner of the box and drag it across the screen to re-position the end of the cut; likewise, re-position the beginning of the cut by dragging the triangle in the opposite corner. You can even pinch-to-zoom to ensure that you cut the exact part of the file you want to use down to the second.

After you have the position of the box to your liking, touch the disk icon in the main action bar to save the file, at which point you will be prompted to name it.

Do so and then select “OK”. A toast notification appears informing you that the file has been saved successfully in a folder specific to the app.

Then, depending on the layout of your phone and how it handles settings, enter into Settings > Sound > Notification (or Ringtone or Alarm depending on the purpose for which you created the cut) and select the file you created.  There you have it! Now when you receive a call or email or text, you will hear the sound you made.

As an additional tip, initially on my Nexus 7 I ran into the issue of the name of the file I created being absent from the list of notification files in my sound settings. I failed to realize though that during the process of cutting the file, you need to enter into Slicer’s settings…

…And change the file type so that it knows where to place the finished product.

I made a Ringtone file (the default file type that Slicer creates) the first time by mistake and wondered why I failed to locate it in when trying to set my notification sound, so that is what happened.

Because it is in beta, Slicer may still suffer from bugs  from time to time, though I experienced no miscues while creating this lesson.

And as you can see from the screenshot above, the “FX” options in the app is still notably missing, though they will most assuredly be present once the app comes out of beta.

Nevertheless, Ringtone Slicer, as it stands, is still the best at what it does: creating sweet tones. And at the end of the day, is that not what we want to do with our Android devices?

That does it for this lesson.  As always, if you have any other categories you would like us to tackle, any apps you would like us to review, or any lessons about Android you would like to learn, please let us know in the comments.  Thank you for reading!