Use Digital Music as Tones

Tip

One way to get around the DRM restriction in playing digital music on your Treo is to burn restricted songs to an audio CD and then rip them back down to your computer as MP3 files. Burned audio CDs don't have any DRM restrictions, so you can rip music from them without DRM entering the picture. Admittedly, this process is a hassle, but it's one of the only guaranteed solutions at the moment.

One final topic worth tackling is a common question I hear from people after they realize how cool it is to listen to digital music on their Treo: Can I use an MP3 song as a ring tone? The short answer is yes, absolutely! The longer answer is that you must rely on a third-party application to do so. In other words, there's no way to do it with built-in Treo applications.

You have a couple of options when it comes to playing digital music as ring tones. The ideal option is to play digital music files as ring tones in the same format you use to listen to them in a media player. This way you don't have to create a special version of each song just for the purpose of using it as a ring tone. The following third-party applications make it possible to use a digital music file (MP3 or WMA) directly as a ring tone:

• LightWav http://www.toysoft.ca/lightwav.html

• Treo Guard http://www.geakware.com/treoguard/

The other option for playing digital music as a ring tone involves converting from a digital music format to the native ring tone format, which is MIDI. Wav2Tones is a tool by Toysoft, the makers of LightWav (see the preceding bulleted list), that enables you to convert from the WAV audio format to the MIDI format, effectively allowing you to turn sampled digital audio into a MIDI ring tone. To find out more about the Wav2Tones application, visit the Wav2Tones web page at http://www.toysoft.ca/wav2tones.html.

Note

The WAV format is popular on Windows computers for digital audio in general, so you won't have any problems finding interesting sounds in the WAV format. Of course, you might need to convert digital music from MP3 to WAV before being able to use the Wav2Tones application. Visit http://www.mp3towav.org/to check out a variety of audio conversion tools, including an MP3-to-WAV converter utility.