Ringsmith: Ringtone Maker

Ringsmith cuts a piece out of an audio file you already have and puts it where your phone looks for ringtones, alarms and notification sounds. It is built around one idea: it never sees anything you did not hand it.

★ IT DOES NOT ASK FOR YOUR MUSIC
Ringsmith never asks for permission to your music, your files or your microphone. There is no list of your music in this app, because there is no permission to make one. You pick a file in Android's own file picker, which hands over that one file and nothing else, and the app lets go of it again when you leave the screen.

★ NOTHING HERE IS RE-ENCODED
Your clip is the same sound at the same quality as the file it came from, because the app copies the compressed audio rather than decoding it and building it again. An MP3 stays an MP3, and a 320 kbps file stays 320 kbps. One honest consequence follows from that: the cut lands on the nearest frame, about a fiftieth of a second, so a clip is never shorter than you asked for and can be a hair longer.

★ TWO HANDLES AND YOUR EARS
Set the start and the end to a tenth of a second, with buttons that step by 0.1 s and 1 s. Press play to hear the selection on its own. When you reach the right moment, press Start here or End here and the handle goes to where the sound is. There is no waveform picture, on purpose: at phone size one pixel of a four-minute song is most of a second, which looks like precision and is not.

★ RINGTONE, ALARM OR NOTIFICATION
Choose which of the three it is, and the clip goes into that folder, where every app that lets you pick a sound can find it. Setting a sound as your phone's default is optional: Android decides that, so Ringsmith opens Android's own screen to ask, and the rest of the app works whether you allow it or not.

★ WHAT IT CAN CUT, AND WHAT IT WILL NOT
MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, Opus, Ogg Vorbis and AMR files are all cut without re-encoding. FLAC, Windows Media, Apple Lossless and AIFF files are refused by name, on screen, because cutting one would mean re-encoding it - and this app will not quietly hand you back a worse copy of your own sound.

★ YOUR SOUNDS ARE YOURS
They go into the phone's own Ringtones, Alarms and Notifications folders, not inside this app, so your file manager shows them and they stay behind if you uninstall it. Nothing is uploaded and there is nothing to sign in to; the app needs the internet only for ads. Android's cloud backup is switched off here, and it is worth knowing what that costs before you rely on it: a new phone starts with Ringsmith at its defaults.

★ AND THE REST
- The sounds you have made, listed by asking the phone rather than by keeping a second copy of the answer.
- Play any of them without leaving the app.
- Delete one and it is really gone - the app says so first, and does not pretend afterwards that it can be put back.
- Light and dark, and your wallpaper colours if you want them.
- Every length is read out in words by a screen reader, and every control has a name.

Ads: one full-screen ad now and then, after you save a sound and leave that screen - never while you are choosing one, never while it is playing, and never when you delete one. Watch a short video in Settings to turn ads off for a day.

Needs Android 10 or later. Below that, saving into your phone's sound folders would need permission to every file on the device, and asking for that is the one thing this app was built not to do.

Privacy policy: https://dash-fusion.github.io/privacy/list-ringtone