Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.- Alan Kay
For most people I receive a lot of iMessages from I've setup a custom text tone on their contact. I've got a couple new people I needed to give sounds and I wondered, can I do this entirely on the iPad? Well, probably not, but let's get started.
I was asked to get a sound for "Mr Krabs" - which I'll admit, I didn't know who that was, and also Kermit the Frog's "Hi Ho." First step is to find a YouTube clip of sounds and download it using one of the web-based download services. I have found the best way to do this is get the URL YouTube, paste it into a YouTube download site, get the URL of the converted MP3 and then paste that URL into GoodReader to download. Trying to download/export directly in Safari don't always work well for me. Once the file is in GoodReader, I can export to Files / iCloud Drive.
I was asked to get a sound for "Mr Krabs" - which I'll admit, I didn't know who that was, and also Kermit the Frog's "Hi Ho." First step is to find a YouTube clip of sounds and download it using one of the web-based download services. I have found the best way to do this is get the URL YouTube, paste it into a YouTube download site, get the URL of the converted MP3 and then paste that URL into GoodReader to download. Trying to download/export directly in Safari don't always work well for me. Once the file is in GoodReader, I can export to Files / iCloud Drive.
The next step is to trim down the portion of sound that I want. No problems here, import the file into a Hokusai project for audit editing on the iPad and export it back out as a new m4a file.
So close, but sadly, I couldn't make it any further than this as I ran into two things that were tricky on the device. The first seems really crazy to me - you have to change the extension from m4a to m4r, and you would think that should be easy except the Files App doesn't let you change extensions on files. Ha! I did reading and searching and nope. The one work around people have suggested is there are some apps which will let you clone the file into the App's storage, rename the file extension, and then export back into Files. But, I cheated, and just used Screens to connect to my Mac server and rename the extension.
The second one I sort of expected. There is no way to take that m4r file inside of Files and add it as a ringtone on the device which could be tied to a contact. I tried messaging it to myself and messaging around in files - but nothing work. So for that too, I had to turn back to my Mac. I use a cool program called "WALTR" that lets you drop files on the Mac and have them wireless transferred over to the iOS device using the Mac's iOS sync APIs (without doing an iTunes sync) - and that worked like a charm.
Soo booooya! I got two new ringtones.
Update: Well, I actually added the ringtones to my Phone and then realized they weren't on the iPad which can also receive messages and calls. When contacts sync through iCloud it doesn't sync the custom ringtone files. I guess it's possible if I had Apple Music paid where my music files are in the cloud maybe it would? Anyway, I just used WALTR to plop them onto the other device and I'm good. Also I need to keep a backup of all the m4r files in iCloud