QuickAdvice: Dring Makes Ringtone Making Beautiful - Plus Giveaway!
Dring ($0.99) by Wake Apps is a beautiful ringtone maker for your iPhone.
Since Apple began to allow ringtone makers into the App Store, there's been a flood of them. But Dring knocks it up a notch with gorgeous pixels and extra abilities than just cutting out a part of a song.
When you open up Dring, you're greeted with a beautiful interface. From this point, you can grab a song from the iPod.app and import it into Dring. Or if you're a little more daring, you can make your own ringtones by recording your own sound snippets via the five buttons along the bottom.
What if you can't decide between music or a recording? Dring has you covered there too - you can actually import a song and add a recording layer over it! If you rather just have one or the other, you can go that route too. There are toggles at the top that show you if there is music or recordings.
For recordings, you can also combine several small clips. Once you make a recording and then record another one, it will be blended together into what appears as a single recording on the visualizer.
Dring also allows you to add a fade in and fade out effect to your ringtone with the Fade button. I found the results to be very spot-on and smooth. This can be toggled on and off as you please.
When you're making your music ringtone, you can scrub the bar beneath the visualizer to move to a different part of the song. Then you can drag the handles of the selected portion to your liking. Dring will allow you to create ringtones of up to 40 seconds in length, which is fine since most of the time you'll only hear 30 seconds or so. If you tap and hold an end of the selector, the app will tell you how far into the song that part is, which is very nice when you're trying to fine-tune the ringtone to have perfect timing.
Once you create that awesome ringtone, you have to save it. Simply tap that Save button and the app will show you a progress bar and percentage of the export process. When it's done, you can access it via iTunes file sharing. Another method of sharing is to email it.
Additionally, there are options to share on Twitter and Facebook, but I found that doing this doesn't result in a link to the ringtone or anything like that. I'm not sure what the purpose of these are if there isn't going to be a link to the tune I just created. Hopefully the developers can fix this in a future update.
There is one pretty big flaw though - the app currently doesn't work with headphones. I plugged in a pair and when playing the ringtone, the sound was still coming out from my phone's speakers. Hopefully the developer can fix this in an update very soon, since it seems like a silly slip-up to make.
For those that are looking for an amazing ringtone maker, then Dring is definitely it. If you're undecided on whether or not to get it, there is also a Dring Lite version available. The limitations of the free version include:
- 20 second ringtones
- No custom recording, only music
GIVEAWAY: Luckily, I have 10 free copies of the full version of Dring to give away to 10 lucky AppAdvice.com readers! Simply leave a comment of why you need a ringtone maker app. For an additional chance to win, please follow and tweet your reason to @christyxcore with the hashtag #DringGiveaway. I will leave this contest open until December 31, 2010 at 11:59 PM PST. Good luck!
