Like so many other Cell phone carriers, Helio has encumbered their devices with draconian restrictions in an attempt to steer their (apparently cash hemorrhaging) customers into overpriced proprietary media downloads. The Fin (and many other Helio Kit) are plenty capable of decoding mp3s and playing arbitrary media as a ringtone or other event notification; the fact that you can’t do this out of the box is possibly the greatest annoyance conceived of in the history of cellular technology. Fret not though, the no-custom media restriction can be bypassed by tricking the phone into thinking your custom media is from a source within the network. Specifically, the Fin will allow ringtones to be set as MPEG-4 3gpp videos: videos it thinks are from other camera phones or taken itself.
Disclaimer: I don’t work for SKTelecom (Helio). I guarantee no level of service support for this article. YMMV. Also, Since I haven’t had much time to work on this article, I’ve only included the section on creating ringtones.
Creating Custom Ringtones for the Helio Fin with iMovie.
Getting your custom sounds into Helio Fin ringtone format is as simple as rendering them to an MPEG-4 file and renaming it.
The Fin will check a few things before allowing media to be used as a ringtone.
- The video format - yes, you must have a video track for your ringtone.
- The audio format - no, it won’t allow straight mpeg1-layer3 audio
- The file size - there’s some limits just so it won’t run out of memory
- The file name - we’ll have to rename the extension before loading it to the phone.
Once you have these requirements met, your media will work just fine. To get your media into this format, we’ll use iMovie and Quicktime export.
Creating the ringtone
Start by creating a new project in iMovie. I generally like to make 1 new project per each ringtone I make. I the drop down menu, you’ll want to select MPEG-4 as the video format. You might want to save the project in a subdirectory of your Movies directory if you plan on making a lot of ringtones. The Fin requires that an MPEG-4 file have a video track in order to play it as a ringtone. This probably assumes that if it does, it’s from a phone or at least isn’t really just a custom ringtone. It’s annoying, but easy to get around.
Once you’re into the main iMovie editing window, click over to the “Media” tab, then select “Photos”. Select a photo from the iPhoto selector and click the checkmark button in the preview to drop it into the editor. If you like to have a custom ringtone for each of your callers, you might want to get an appropriate photo for the friend you’re making the ringtone for. Once you have a video track, click over to “Audio” and browse to the audio clip you’d like to turn into your ringtone. When selecting, don’t worry if the clip is in the middle of the song, we’ll set that start point in the editor after we drop it in.
Drag your sound file to the audio track in the editor. iMovie will spend some time importing it and then some time rendering the waveform and audio preview (the green line on top of the waveform). It’s worth noting that the Fin’s ringer is pretty quiet. Make sure that the sound clip is fairly loud; check that the dark purple waveform takes up a good 50% of the middle light purple audio track. If it doesn’t you might want to boost it a little bit by clicking over to the “Editing” tab, Audio FX and raising all the sliders (It usually takes me a couple attempts to get the volume and quality I want, but I’m pretty discerning).
Your final ringtone should be about 30 to 40 seconds long; in most cases you’ll end up playing only 20 seconds or so. Since most songs are much longer than this, you’ll probably want to find the best part of the song to turn into the ringtone. Click the audio track to make sure it is selected. Use the zoom slider in the lower left to zoom into the waveform as it plays and find the point where you want to start the ring. Move the playback head to the exact point you want to start at, then select “Split Selected Audio Clip at Playhead” from the Edit menu (cmd-T). This will make a break in the audio track. Click the section you don’t want (on the left) and hit the delete (backspace) key to clear it from the editor. Move the audio track to about 0:00:05 after the start the project timeline. The small gap will prevent the beginning of your ringtone from getting clipped when it plays on the Fin. Edit the end of the clip by grabbing the right side and sliding the endpoint around. Once your ringtone is the length you want, stretch the photo video track so that it covers the entire audio clip (including the gap at the start).
Exporting the ringtone
After you’re happy with the ringtone and you’ve saved your project, you’ll need to export to the proper file format. In iMovie’s “Share” menu, select “QuickTime”. This will drop down the Share sheet with QuickTime selected. Change the drop down menu to “Expert Settings” and click Share. This will show a brief compressing sheet and then pop a Save dialog. Here’s where we trick the Fin into thinking it has a camera phone video. We’ll need to choose the correct video codec as well as rename the file extension.
Select “Movie to MPEG-4″ in the Export drop down menu.
Click the “Options…” button.
In the MPEG-4 Video settings, set the following options:
- File Format: MP4
- Video Format: MPEG-4 Basic
- Data Rate: 32 kbits/sec
- Image Size: 176 x 144 QCIF
- Frame Rate: 8
- Key Frame: Automatic
In the MPEG-4 Audio settings, set the following options:
- Audio Format: AAC-LC (Music)
- Data Rate: 64 kbps
- Channels: Mono
- Output Sample Rate: 44.100 kHz
- Encoding Quality: Better
Click OK.
Now, change the “.mp4″ file extension to “.3g2″.
Click Save. This will begin the movie compression. If all goes well, you’ll have your ringtone in the right format for playing on the Fin once this completes.
Loading the ringtone on your Helio Fin
Getting your ringtone onto your Fin is fairly easy. Just email it to yourself! There is one caveat however: Helio caps the size of attachment downloads. In order to download, your ringtone must be less than 1MB. For 30 second ringtones however, this usually isn’t a problem as most files exported with the above process will come out to around 300KB-700KB.
Once you’ve emailed the ringtone to your Helio Fin, check your Helio Mail and download the ringtone. After downloading, the “Download” button becomes an “Action” button. Click the spark again and select the #2 option “Save to Video Album”. Click the red power button to return to the main screen, then the camera button. Go to [3] Int Album. Select the default folder and find the your ringtone video. I like to put all my ringtones into a separate Ringtones folder. Once you’ve found your ringtone in your internal album*, use the left soft key to select Menu, then [3] Set as Ring.
Done!
*When browsing videos in your internal album, the volume will start out a little low and increase. This doesn’t really affect the ring volume
That worked perfectly, thank you! Now my co-workers will stop complaining about my lame ringtones!
an easier way to do this is simply to get Audacity for MAC. Using that program (freeware btw) you just open whatever mp3 you want for a ringtone. select the section of the song that you want (i’d say no more than 25 sec or so), go to file>export selection as mp3. save it somewhere you can find it! then, this sounds odd, but find the file and change the extension from mp3 to mid. DON’T WORRY!!! It’s NOT going to become an MIDI file! click ok to the change.
now, just email yourself that file. i use the Gmail in my hotbox on my fin so it’s there in a couple of seconds. when you open the message click download, then action, and save as ringtone. it’s now on your phone under the “bell rings” section of your rings. take a listen! full mp3 audio for free for any song on the planet!!!
(these instructions are exactly the same for the Helio Ocean as well, only instead of changing the extension from mp3 to mid, it’s mp3 -> mmf)
If downloading and compiling libm3plame from source (for Audacity export) is your idea of easier, then yeah, I guess you don’t need this tutorial. If you just want a ringtone with the software that came in the box, perhaps this is easier.
Oh, and btw, this tutorial works for m4p protected AACs from iTunes unlike Audacity.
that was awesome thanks a mill
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