Running as Root

I was talking about ring tones with some people at work yesterday. It reminded me that I had wanted to get better ring tones for my wife's phone. I don't need them since mine is on vibrate most of the time. In particular, I wanted the "They Meet" theme from Ms. Pacman. A lot of games have surprisingly good sound tracks, so it'd be cool to be able to do the whole thing myself. There are pretty good instructions on converting WAVs to QCPs on the SprintUsers forums which should work well for any phone that supports QCP ringers.

Now the only problem is that while MIDI songs that could be used as ring tones are pretty easy to find, crop, and transfer, I didn't have a MIDI file for the Ms. Pacman theme (plus, why would simply transferring a MIDI file to my phone be cool?). It turns out that the latest version of Mame32 (an arcade emulator) supports dumping the sound from the game to a WAV file. I loaded up Ms. Pacman and played to level 3 capturing the desired sound.

After that, I just loaded the WAV into my favorite audio editing program (the forums recommend WavePad although I have not personally tried it). I boosted the volume and then saved the file out to a lower quality mono WAV file. I then used the command line utility provided by Qualcomm called PureVoice to convert the WAV to QCP. Finally, I sent the file to my phone using the Phone Uploader web site that has worked well for me in the past. The uploader was originally intended for Sprint phones, but should work with quite a few other providers.

I'm happy with the end result. It seems like a good set of steps for converting any audio file to a QCP ring tone. I'd recommend trying it out if you're interested. It beats the hell out of renting a ring tone for $2.50 for 90 days.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 9:13 am and is filed under Entertainment, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.