If you are a typical prepaid customer, then you may have been disappointed in the past with the lack of ringtone support. While this isn't a bad thing since most ringtone services will stick you with an extra $10 a month for their services. Luckily, there are alternatives and since the new Straight Talk plan comes with 30 megs of data, you don't have to pay for each upload to your phone.

The best way to get ringtones and wall papers on your prepaid phone is to make your own of course! This is actually quite easy as long as you have the right software. Such software is actually quite inexpensive, one of the better ones is Ring Factory (owned by Bling Software Ltd.). This software allows you to make your own ringtones from existing MP3s and/or your very own Download the latest MP3s cheaply from Amazon.


Making ringtones with this software is quite easy. Below is a simple step by step guide showing you how to make your own ringtones from existing MP3s.

1. Fire up Ring factory and click on 'File' then 'Open Audio File from My Computer'. Ring Factory will now load the audio file and a graphical representation of the file as show below.

2. Once you have the audio file open, its time to pick what portion of the song you want to use as a ring tone. You want to keep your ring tone as small as possible, especially if you plan on texting it to your phone since it's going to use up bandwidth. A 20 to 30 second section of song is really all you need. It is probably best no to go over 1 minute. To do so, simply left click and drag across the area you want to select as shown below. Ring Factory allows you to listen to your ring tone by simply pressing the play button (circled in red below). It might be a good idea to use a lower bitrate which you can select on the bottom left, 96 works well and will keep your tones small.





3. Now it is just a matter of saving your ring tone snippet. Simply go to file and pick 'Save My Ringtone As'. Give it a name, make it nice and simple though to avoid any complications with phone compatibility. Pick mp3 for the 'Save as type'.


4. Now that you have your ringtone saved, its just a matter of transferring it to your phone. There are a few ways you can accomplish this.

-If your phone has Bluetooth, then you may want to get an inexpensive Bluetooth dongle so your computer can connect to it. All Straight Talk Phones have Bluetooth except the LG100 and LG200.


-The other way, is to message the ringtone link to your phone. Here is a tool for you to do that after you have your ringtone segment described above. It will not work with full mp3 files greater than .5 mb Upload SMS tool