Posted on by Jake

Create Your Own Sprint Ringtones

For the past couple of weeks now I’ve been looking off and on about how to make my own ringtones for my Sprint PCS phone. I’ve managed to find some resources that said my Sanyo PM-8200 phone will support polyphonic ringtones. These are essentially just MIDI files and thus can’t do anything more than notation. Nice, but they can hardly compare with the ringtones that are available for $2.50 apiece from Sprint’s site that expire in 90 days. I wanted something of that quality, but without the price or the expiration. So I kept looking. What I discovered was that those fancy rigntones were in a QCP file format. I also discovered a simple command line application, PureVoice that can convert a WAV file into QCP format. Now the only thing I had left to discover was how to get that QCP file to my phone. In looking for that, I discovered a Free Mobile Phone Uploader site that will either send a text message with a link to download your file or give you a Jump Code to allow you to download it.

So now I can have any sound I want in the entire world as a ringtone. Using a little creativity, that can include clips from songs that I downloaded from iTunes for $.99. The basic steps to do that are:

  1. Purchase the song from iTunes.
  2. Convert that file to MP3 format. You can either burn it to a CD then rip it, or use JHymn.
  3. Convert the file to WAV, shorten it to 30 seconds or less. I used Audacity for that task.
  4. Reduce the sound quality to be PCM, mono, 8 kHz, 16-bit. I was unable to figure out how to do that in Audacity, so I simply used the sound recorder app that comes with Windows.
  5. Use PureVoice Converter to convert the WAV file to a QCP file (drag the WAV file onto pvconv.exe).
  6. Upload the QCP file to the Mobile Phone Uploader.
  7. Download it from that site to your phone and assign it like you would any other ringtone.

Update 25-May-2005: Newer phones (like the Sanyo’s that start with “MM”) can use a different, and better sounding, format.
Update 8-Feb-2006: Thanks to Tony, we now know how to make ringtones for free! (Hint: Use walmart.com as step 1).

177 Replies to “Create Your Own Sprint Ringtones”

  3. I’m not sure if that’d be possible or not. The real trick is to get it into WAV format with the following attributes: PCM, mono, 8kHz, 16-bit. After that, the PureVoice converter can make it into a QCP file. It may be possible to use Windows Sound Recorder to record the sound as flash plays it.

  6. I figured out how to do that months ago, following the almost the same steps (skipping iTunes, using Adobe Audition, uploading via SprintUsers.com Focus).

    $2.50 for a ringtone is highway robbery.

  7. I just got my phone about three months ago, so I didn’t really have any reason to try making ring tones before then. The important part, obviously, is the converting to the QCP file format. In the couple of tones that I’ve done, however, the sound quality is horrible compared to the $2.50 ones from the Sprint site. Is there an app that will convert WAV files at a higher bitrate? Or some app that will convert to 8kHz 16-bit sound with less loss of quality?

  9. You can use Winamp to easily convert the mp3 to a wav file with the desired specifications. I’m having a problem though… Months ago I was able to successfully make sprint ringtones, now I can’t. See when I convert the .wav into .qcp, the purvoice converter reduces the file size to 0 bytes, making it unuploadable. Has anyone else experienced this issue or can provide a solution to my problem? Thanks

  10. In my limited expirience, the PureVoice converter will output a 0 byte file if the input WAV has stereo sound instead of mono sound. I think it will automatically convert to a lower bitrate, but I could be wrong about that.

  12. I am having trouble converting with purevoice. I drag it onto the .exe file but it only opens its player. Help

    Also tried to dl 1 to my phone, it said insufficient mem for a 200kb file. my phone is the sanyo pm 8200

  13. Joe – cut the tune down to 20-30 seconds (the phone won’t play more than that anyway). Also, drag the file onto the PVCONV.EXE file for conversion, not the player…

  17. I was able to get the file into .WAV form… BUT, when I try to turn the .WAV into .QCP, all it does is want to play the file. Well on your blog, you said, “Also, drag the file onto the PVCONV.EXE file for conversion, not the player…” Well, apparently, I didn’t get a PVCONV.EXE file with my PureVoice player… Do you have any suggestions to fix this? It’s just the last step I need… (Oh, and oddly enough, my .WAV file is like 6MB, that’s HUGE! Why is it so big?)

  18. Hello Jake,

    I remember coming to this site earlier this year but my motherboard went bad and I lost all the info. There was a site that you posted to convert mp3 files to wav files. You had given a webpage for 4 sites to dl to make ringtones for the sprint phone. If you have those site can you please send them to me.

    Thanks Lyric

  21. The process works but the quality of the ringers isnt that great, its hard to understand and not very loud, even when i turned the volume up as loud as it could go in sound forge..

  22. Sh*t I can’t believe this really worked. Awesome job on putting this whole step-by-step list together. Like a guy posted above, my sound quality is a little scratchy too, but I’m playing with fixes for that. But hey it works tho. Great job again!

  24. Hey this is awesome! Great instructions. As some of the other people who have used this, the sound quality isn’t the best. Does anyone have a good solution?

  25. After i do everything, my sanyo-8200 will start to download the ringer, then data error 905 attribute mismatch shows up and it doesnt download.. what should i do???

  26. Can you download the ringtones using the UBS Data Cable? I dont have the internet option on my phone any more so I’m wondering if you can use these same steps and upload the tones to the phone through the cable.

  27. IM HAVING THAT SAME PROBLEM ALL OF A SUDDEN ITS T URNING TO O BYTES.ONE THING I FOUND STRANGE IS WHEN I RIGHT CLICKED THE WAV FILE AND WENT TO PROPERTIES IT WOULDNT SHOW.EVERY THING WAS BLANK.HELP WOULD BE APPRECIATED.

  29. It worked! I used Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.5 to convert mp3 into .wav and then to make it Mono, 8 khz and 16 bit. If anyone wants the TV Show “24” CTU ringtone, let me know. Jake you are THE MAN!!!

  31. Ok – found what the problem was with 0 bytes. You have to convert the mp3 to wav in single channel (aka mono) rather than stereo. When I converted to qcp, it didn’t give me 0 bytes.

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  33. I’ve did everything step by step and 1 ringtone came out perfect. But now everytime i get the ringtone 2 my phone it is sped up or the song is faster than normal. Wut am i doing wrong??

  38. If you go to the website which he states has the converter, all you have to do is use it and say itunes or whatever you use to play music and it will record in the correct format for your phone. Thats what I’ve been doing instead of recording from itunes to windows sound recorder or whatever its call, then using the converter. The quality seems to be a little better for me.

  39. I’m sorry my last commment was a littel confusing. If you download the actual recorder program…it looks like this QUALCOMM: v2.0.0 for Windows 2000/XP… it lets you record directly into the correct format for your phone. It seems to give a little better sound quality probably because it doesn’t go through so many processes of quality reduction…or something.

  40. dunno went to website to download purevoice not downloading for some reason help?

    o yeah mobilefun.com also sends anything you want to your phone you can send any pic u have or any ringtone very kool

  44. jake, you the man! works like a charm. i also have the problem of the quality being less than perfect, but i guess some tweaks to the wav file with soundforge will have to be the best option. if you clean up the file so there arent any distortion places and then boost the volume before you save it, the *.qcp file comes out a lot cleaner. hope this helps those looking to clean their files up.

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