I am so cool (or at least my phone is!)

After waiting anxiously for our contract with the "other" provider to end so we could keep our numbers, we switched to Cingular and got cool new phones. Hey, when your only phone is your cell phone, it needs to be cool. At least that's how I justified getting the model with a high-resolution camera and super-deluxe music functionality. Thankfully, W gets a work discount on these things.

After months of having a "scat" ringtone (the vocal kind of scat, not the nature kind used to identify animals, but I digress), I finally got adventurous. I bought the new Hairspray CD and decided the song "I Can Hear the Bells" would make the perfect ringtone. So I imported the CD into iTunes, bluetoothed the song over to my phone (I *love* technology!), and was sorely disappointed when my phone wouldn't accept it as a ringtone. No explanation, no nothing. I spent the afternoon at the pool with 6 kids (yes, I was counting heads every 30 seconds) and that blasted phone trying to make it see things my way. Maybe it's just not a Hairspray fan.

Then I got to thinking...maybe the song was too long. Sounds stupid, but I couldn't get anywhere with file format or memory location, so let's try the most un-technical answer. Besides, the beginning of the song makes a goofy ringtone. Surely there was a way to save a short segment from the middle of the song as a small file for the ringtone. I decided to research possibilities and use my resources wisely, which means I asked W how to do it. We decided GarageBand could probably handle it easiest and I could just drag the file from iTunes and drop it into a new project. GarageBand than neatly turned the file into a digital track split into beats and measures! Technology rocks! Then all I had to do was find the part I wanted, copy it, and paste it into a new track. I deleted all the other tracks, and viola! There was my ringtone file! After using the share function to save it as mp4 (just like the one I tried earlier), I bluetoothed it over to my phone, which immediately asked me if I'd like to use the new file as my ringtone. Why yes, I would.

Now my phone says "I can hear the bells" whenever someone calls and I have a feeling I may be giving everyone their own custom ringtone soon, 'cause this is all just too easy and too fun.