Windows Phone 7 and ringtones

My wife has the Winphone7 and although it is a fine phone, if Sprint had the iPhone 4S when we were out looking, I probably would have gotten that one...

Anyway, my wife likes the Fur Elise by Beethoven. Her first basic phone from years ago had that as one of the default choices, and she stuck with it through the next phones.

The first one was just a normal electronic version that a phone could generate. Her next phone (well really next two) was a win6.5 phone that could play certain audio files. (I don't remember what format it needed, but it wasn't obscure)

So now a few years later, with all modern phones playing MP3s and her new WP7 smartphone with that ability...surely it would be simple to add that Fur Elise MP3 as a ringtone...no.

The original WP7 did not have that capability...it had a bunch of ringtones, and it could play MP3 files, but you could not add to the ringtone list.

The greatly anticipated Mango WP7.5 was supposed to have that capability, and finally was pushed out (without problems) to the users.

So I already had that MP3 on her phone...pulled up the ringtone list, and couldn't find an option to add it...so I went to the list of files on the phone...but found no option to make a song a ringtone (like you can with most other phones).

Off to the internet.

Ok it is a simple process to put an MP3 as a ringtone...but not straightforward like in every other smartphone.

First your MP3 has to be under 40 seconds, next it has to be less than 1Meg in size, finally in its properties you have to ID it as a ringtone...

I pulled up Audacity to edit the ringtone length (and while I was at it, compressed it a bit, did a high pass filter on it, and raised the volume...for extra credit).

Then I had to pull that file into Zune (the WP7 uses Zune exclusively for everything sync related, updates etc).

Within Zune I looked at the properties of the file, and went to the Genre and had to type in Ringtone.

At this point I didn't think it would work. But I sync'd her phone, and sure enough that file showed up on her ringtone list, and from that point was a normal ringtone.

So she is happy now! Therefore I am happy now!

But I honestly would think that in this modern century, a 'smart' phone could use any file as a rintone...