A Million In One Year

In the third part of the mini-series on building a ringtone web site, we come to the point where we have created several m4r ringtone files (see “Creating A Ringtone Web Site Part #2″) for full instructions on how to do this) - and now we’re ready to upload the iphone ringtones to the website and make them available for auditioning and download.

This part actually ended up being more complex than I was expecting - so if you are planning on making a ringtone web site for iphone ringtones, I hope that reading this blog may well save you some of the tribulation and frustration that I experienced!

If you take a look at my own iphone ringtone site, www.outerspaceringtones.com , you’ll see that the ringtone files are available both for “instant” auditioning and for download as m4r files. We’ll deal with auditioning and download separately, as they both involve quite different processes.

As you can see from outerspaceringtones.com, I used an html table system in order to organize the ringtone download area and keep it tidy - but of course you can organize your page however you wish.

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Step 1 - uploading m4r files and making sure they download correctly.

Now I at first thought that it would be a simple matter to upload the m4r files to a designated folder on my web host, and then link to them so that anyone could just download them - in the same manner as you might do if you were making mp3s available for download etc.

However, when I tested this method out at first (in OSX), there was a bug in the system. When the files were downloaded from the site back to my desktop, instead of downloading as “.m4r” files , they downloaded as “.m4r.txt” files - which were full of plain text gibberish.

When I edited the file extension suffix back to .m4r everything worked fine - but I wanted my ringtones to download cleanly and immediately be ready for action. And I didn’t have the faintest idea how to make the files download properly.

I posted my query on the “iphone tribe” over on tribe.net and received a rapid answer! You can check out the original thread here.

In short, my web host needed to configure the server to recognize the “mime type” for m4r files.

I opened a support ticket with the ever-awesome hostgator and they sorted it out within a couple of hours! ( Here’s my affiliate link to hostgator just in case you should feel sufficiently inspired to want to sign up for web hosting with them and earn me a little commission!)

It’s quite likely that many other servers will not have configured the mime type for m4r - so you may well need to go through the same process as I did with your web host.

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Step 2 - creating audio previewing for your ringtones.

Now a simple way to do this would be to create separate mp3 files of your ringtones - and put them up alongside the m4r files on the site, so that users can listen / download.

However, I wanted to do something a bit more fancy than this - and fortunately I knew exactly how to do it.

My dear friends over at Beathive have created a really cool free tool for audio previewing - it’s the Beathive Playbutton! This neat device lets you enter your settings - such as the location of your preview file, color of the play button - and generates code for a flash rollover button which changes color when ready to play.

So the first stage of creating the previews is to create mp3 files of your ringtones and upload them to a folder on your web site. You can create the mp3s from your original audio segments using itunes: first from the iTunes > Preferences menu select “Advanced” then “Importing”. Select “Import Using: MP3 Encoder” and then “Setting: Custom”. I recommend “crunching” the mp3s down to a low quality so that they load fast - this is what I did; because if you are making a large number of files available for audition, it will take quite a while for the buttons to be ready to play.

It turned out in my case that in order to get the preview buttons working the way I wanted them to, there was a fair amount of tweaking to do with the code generated by the beathive playbutton generator. First of all, not really knowing Java, I pretty much had to mess around with the code by trial and error in order to get the buttons configured correctly. For example I had to change the align=”left” tags for align=”center” in order to get the buttons to drop into the center of my table data fields; and I had to figure out which part of the code was the background color so as to get this to blend in with the background color of my data fields.

The worst problem I encountered was that some of the previews simply would not load, for some strange reason - in any browser. The mp3s were in place, the links were correct; but some of the buttons just wouldn’t light up. It took me hours of messing around to finally crack this; I still don’t really know exactly what the problem was; only that I found a solution in a) creating an entirely fresh mp3 with a different title and over 250kb in size, uploading this and linking to it from within the play button code as before. Strange, but whatever.

Another issue was that sometimes in Safari the previews would not load properly and the buttons would not change color / audition. I found that Safari > Empty Cache cured this but needed to be performed quite often. I never needed to empty cache in Firefox.

Well it took a lot of fooling around to get what I expected to be a simple process happening - but now it’s done; the ringtones are up - as are Bidvertiser, Widgetbucks and Kontera Ads - and it’s looking and sounding pretty good IMO. I’ve also signed up for AzoogleAds - waiting for approval from them and then after that monetization system is implemented it will be time to start a traffic driving campaign on an epic scale … I have a few ideas up my sleeve;) … I’ll implement them and see how well they work before revealing them… stay tuned….

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Tags: #3 How-To Articles, Creating A Ringtone Website //