my phone can play mp3s as ringtones, and i can crop it to like 20 secs or whatever, but it sounds distorted. is it because of the original file, or is there a way to tweak it to make it sound nicer as a ringtone? i know ringtones arent that important, but its always nice to know how to do stuff. anyways im confused.
It sounds distorted not because of the phone quality transfer or whatever… its because you are trying to play an mp3 through a 3mm or smaller speaker.
You could adjust the sound maybe with the phone EQ? Not sure really.
exactly, you can’t expect the quality of a song to be good just because the bitrate of the file is good.
The limitation is solely on the hardware playing the audio IE: the tiny distorted speaker.
if it sounds bad then you need to lower the volume when editing (or mess with the EQ like canto says) until you find a suitable volume that wont distort on your phone.
it generally takes me 2 attempts, maybe 3 in order to hit that sweet spot.
Also: Google helps for such general questions like this one, there are tons of how-to’s already written up available online. 
it might help to know what kind of phone he has first before saying its his phone. my phone lets me use mp3’s as ring tones and they generally sound pretty good.
Yeah, I used to have a LG Trax and would put mp3’s on there. I had to play around with the bitrate to get it just right. Even though it’s a small speaker I wouldn’t adjust it to play at a quality less than 125. On the other side I wouldn’t adjust it to a much higher rate like 256 kbps either because with those speakers you’ll never be able to hear it at a higher quality than what those tiny speakers can produce.
edit it with audacity
you also need a dll to make them mp3 files
alright thanks for the help. i have a ericsson w760a and the only how-to i could really find was this one. how accurate is this?
this has a link for the mp3 thing for audacity
If you have a decent amount of memory on the phone, you should be able to just throw the whole song on there without any compression and it’ll play from the beginning as a ringtone. In my case I have a Nokia with decent speakers that can’t use mp3s because T-Mobile is jerks, so I convert the files to WAV (I alter preferences in iTunes to import WAVs, then right click a track and make a copy) and throw them onto my 2GB card via Bluetooth from the Mac. Works fine.
man just use mp3directcut its free and easy to use, if you original mp3 is distorted then it will sound distorted if it sounds good then it will sound good on your phone
http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-410-shortening-your-mp3-song-with-mp3directcut
to use the program stop the song where you want it click SET BEGIN and where you want it to end click SET END then go to FILE and SAVE SELECTION