aRing (Ringtone Manage)

Summary

Zapp and co. make a lot of money selling ring tones. Do you also want to set your favorite song as your ring tone, and are looking for something cool to set as your SMS sound, but don’t feel like forking over $5? Sure, you could just set up a music file to be your ring tone, but you would prefer the ring tone to be the refrain or your favorite verse, rather than the beginning of the song.

You could labor over transforming the file on your computer, or you could simplify things by using aRing—because that’s what it promises to do.

Does it succeed, or should you steer clear of this app?
 

As mentioned, you can work on MP3, WAV or OGG files in your phone using aRing.

After starting it, aRing combs through your SD-card searching for music files. This can take several seconds, depending on the size of your music collection. Once the entire list has been loaded you can get going, but you have to find your favorite track first, of course. This isn’t exactly a piece of cake, as the songs don’t get sorted alphabetically, but rather according to where they were found on the SD-card, presumably. Furthermore, only the track’s title, length, and file type are displayed, so there’s no point in searching for the artist. Unfortunately, you can’t change the way the songs get sorted—believe me, I tried.

Luckily, the developer thought to include a search option… or so I thought, because I found the search option to be thoroughly weird. Sometimes I get lucky and manage to find my track, other times: nothing doing. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, either. And to top it all off, the program in the search function kept crashing.

Well shucks, too bad!

If you do manage to find your song, there will be three functions to choose from. The song is played and you can listen to it. You can then set it to be Music, Notification, Alarm or Ringtone.

In case you don’t like the way the track is sounding, you can still edit and rearrange it. The song then gets loaded and shown by an equalizer, on which beginning and end can be determined. This works really well, and in order to work even more efficiently you can zoom in and out.

If you’re happy with what your result you can then save the song in one of the categories mentioned above.
 

Operating this app is okay. The buttons and different functions are pretty self-explanatory, but the search and sorting functions are totally confusing, especially for beginners.

Unfortunately, the Landscape Modus (horizontal) is also missing from aRing, so a lot of users will find entries (especially search entries) to be a hassle.

That being said, mixing tracks is really easy to do—this part is well thought-out. There are no superfluous or confusing buttons.

But on the whole, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, especially as far as the search function and general clearness go.
 

The app’s speed is passable. If your music library is relatively small the holding time isn’t too long, but as soon as you have a more sizeable collection aRing starts to buckle under the pressure.

Otherwise aRing runs quite smoothly, except for when you want to use the search function.

It’s really a shame! Improvements need to be made on performance and stability.
 

You can download aRing for free from the Android Market.

However, you should note that there are some ad flashes in the lower margin. Luckily the ads don’t show up when you’re editing the tracks, only when you’re using the root menu.