I’ve been embarking on a voyage of nostalgia recently. Specifically ripping a ringtone I love from my dads’ old Samsung flip phone to use on my modern android. Basically I took the phone apart and soldered a 3.5mm jack to the circuit board and plugged the other end into my laptop. It sounds pretty good on my laptop. I used some of the effects and stuff to amplify and clear it up a bit, I’m no audio engineer but I was happy with the result.
After I just exported it as an mp3 and sent it to my phone and it sounds awful. the volume chops and changes and there’s some sort of distortion. If I play the exported mp3 on my laptop it sounds fine. I tried exporting it in a different format and bit rate or something but I don’t really know what that stuff changes.
It’s distorted plus there’s “something wrong” when it’s mixed-down to mono and that’s probably why it sounds worse on your phone’s mono speaker.
You didn’t post the original file so I don’t if it was caused by you trying to make it “clearer” or if the original file was messed-up.
You can improve it by just killing by killing one side and making it mono -
Click the drop-down arrow to the left of the waveform and select Split Stereo To Mono.
Then click the “X” (to left of the drop-down arrow) to kill one of the tracks.
Now you have a mono track and it will sound better on the phone’s speaker.
Thank you SO much you were spot on when I set it to mono it plays the same on the phone and the PC. I tried to upload the project earlier but it said it was too big - I had wondered if there was a place in the forum I could post it for someone actually competent to take a pass at it!
Did you capture the original performance in MP3? MP3 increases compression distortion every time you make a new one. Make a perfect-quality WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit file of the performance. Do all the effects and corrections. Then make an MP3 if you want to.
If you connected the two wires from the original phone to the two hot wires of your recorder, you probably made an out-of-phase stereo recording.
If you do that again, split the upper and lower parts of the track like this: Left Menu > Split Stereo Track. Select one of them > Effect > Invert.
Left Menu > Make stereo track. That should eliminate having the sound different on different players.
You probably don’t need stereo (two blue waves) for a ring tone. Select the track > Tracks > Mix > Mix stereo down to mono.
Hi thanks for your reply on capturing the audio I don’t know how you select mp3 or wav. My settings for quality was 48000Hz 24bit because i just thought its an old ringtone how much quality do I actually need. Or are you referring to recording with a different programme and doing it like that?