I recently switched from Sprint to ATT, and in the process got a new phone: a Sony Ericsson W580i (I have the black version). I LOVE IT. And recently I read about the process of "unbranding," which basically replaces the crippled and annoying ATT firmware with the original Sony Ericsson one.

Among many things, this gave me access to the phone's internal file system, which means I can load whatever ringtones I want. This is where I'm running into problems. The phone can support a few formats for ringtones: MIDI, MP3, and M4A. I can't seem to get my MP3 ringtones to sound quite right on the phone. At least, not like the built-in ones. Naturally, I expected this, but I thought I might get close. Other MP3 sound files sound pretty good from the speaker, but not the ones I put on.

So far, I've been importing some of my audio tracks into Audacity and cropping them down to little segments. After a while I found this guide for making the file sound better coming out of the average cell phone speaker.

I was wondering if you guys had any pointers of your own. I've tried those tips and it sounds better, but still not the greatest, or as good as I think it can get. The phone has a decent speaker, so I should be able to get pretty good results, but I'm not having much luck so far.

Are you changing the bit rate of the snippets?
I haven't tried playing around with making my own ringtones yet, but I've read a lot about it on HoFo and it seems that bit rate is very important. It might take a few tries at different rates to find exactly what your phone wants.
Of course, there's lots to learn from HoFo, and I believe you're already on there, yes?

I, too, just got a new phone- Motorola Z6C on Verizon. Eventually I'll start playing with it, but for now I'm just getting it running and used to it.

If you're looking for a way to make a ringtone sound louder without distortion, then you need to use an audio editing package with a multiband compressor and a limiter.

We've discussed these tools here before in terms of how it relates to audio production and the perceived differences in volume between different CDs. But for ringtones you'd want to really go over-the-top with the settings.

A compressor essentially works like a magic gnome sitting with his hand on the volume knob. When the peaks get loud, he turns it down, when the music is softer, he turns it back up again. It has attack and decay settings that control how quickly he can twirl the knob in each direction, and a ratio setting that controls how far he twirls the knob. This lets you increase the overall volume of the track without distorting the peaks. It's sort of a "soft" adjustment which kind of changes the character of the music.

A limiter works very similar to a compressor, except it's more like a brick wall. All it does is smash down the peaks. A limiter can let you make the music sound VERY LOUD without distorting the peaks and without changing its character much. This will be the most useful tool in your arsenal when trying to make ringtones louder.

A multiband compressor will be especially useful when trying to make ringtones sound good coming out of a phone speaker. It's like a compressor combined with an EQ. You get adjustable frequency ranges to compress. You can do things like make bass frequencies sound more prevalent without making small speakers (like the one on the phone) distort.

Have a look at Reaper as a free multitrack audio editor (although you don't need multitrack for editing ringtones, it's fun to have), and the best part is that it supports VST *plugins*, and you can find all sorts of tools like compressors and limiters as VST plugins.

I would've said bitrate, sample rate and EQ will all make a difference. I've come across a few phones that only sound good when you throw away one channel instead of mono'ing them. Obviously some weird phasing things going on that get cancelled out on a mono speaker. My N95 is 'stereo', there's even a mode that messes with the phase so it sounds '3D'.

Can you download the existing ringtones and listen to it on something decent? I would wager they have their mid's boosted.