I love my iPhone, but there are a couple of things that Apple hasn’t addressed even in this third year of the platform. Editing the user dictionary is one thing (some auto-correction suggestions are words that don’t even exist), but what of SMS ringtones? You can actually “replace” the default mail sound now with Mailtones, but official apps can’t do jack about functionality that has nothing to do with the internet…like text messages. Thank god for jailbreak, then.
Any Ring is a $3.99 Jailbreak App that lets you choose any song on your iPhone for use as a ringtone or SMS tone. It also boasts the ability to do all of the customizing on the device. No computer or syncing required. Unfortunately, in my two days with the app, I experienced crashes on all my phone calls and a few music-stopping bugs.
Choose a song
You can choose to filter the music list by Artists or by Songs, and although there isn’t any alphabetical scrollbar along the side, you can narrow down your choices via the search bar up top. Once you’ve done this, it’s time to set it as your default ring or SMS tone, or just crop the clip to a particular part of the song. Unlike other ringtones which are separate files, Any Ring seems to use the actual iPod app to play the songs (so you can have an entire song as a ringtone), and there’s lag whenever you try to preview your tone selection.
Other notable features here are song looping and volume, which is a great thing to have on the device. It’s always tough to gauge how loud a ringtone is going to sound on your phone when you make it on the desktop, and adjusting on-the-fly is a really cool idea.
As with the default iPhone ringtones, you can set a tone to play for specific contacts, only this time you’re adding specific contacts to ringtones, instead of vice versa (you normally add ringtones to a contact). I actually find the AnyRing method a little easier than Apple’s, since you might want to play the same ringtone for multiple contacts (say, office mates) and another one for family members.
Three tabs? Not quite
Most of what I talked about above is the good stuff. Selecting and trimming a ringtone on-device is a novel approach, but the execution kills the fun. One of the annoying little design choices in AnyRing is the fact that it’s separated into three tabs, when it’s actually really composed of one. The other two tabs consist of an About Page and an advertisement for the developer’s other app, iSmartDialer. I’d expect this kind of interface from a free application, but not when customers pay $3.99. In-app advertising and About pages could also be strewn throughout a scrolling list instead of adding tabs that serve no other function.
Ring, Ring, Crash!
Ringtones I set don’t seem to play over my headphones, but over the iPhone loudspeaker instead (not the case with SMS tones, though). In addition, all of my test phone calls actually crashed Springboard, which meant I sometimes couldn’t answer the phone because it was unresponsive. Customizable ringtones are fantastic, but only if you can answer the phone when you hear them.
SMS Tones can be long and almost uninterruptable
One of the things that I read in a Rock customer review was that there was no easy way to stop an SMS tone once it started going. Normally these tones last about 1-3 seconds (and you can trim SMS tones like ringtones), but you can actually set an entire song to play when you receive a text message. I find that absolutely hilarious!
This means that an incoming text could theoretically start a 3-minute tone and subsequent texts won’t replay the tone if it’s still going (so you’ll only hear one sound for back-to-back texts if the tone is long). Finally, the only way I found to stop an SMS tone mid-play was to launch the iPod application, which is something you’ll have to do anyway if you were listening to music before the text arrived. This is because an incoming text will kill any music you were playing and won’t restart it after the tone ends. I use my iPhone for music very often, so this was a real show stopper for me.
Conclusion
I’m definitely going to drop AnyRing for now. I know that jailbreak apps can sometimes be in conflict, so I tried to shut down as many other processes as I could during the course of this review. Unfortunately, there are some apps I’m just not willing to give up for the sake of ringtones (universal search, battery control, Notifier, and an mQuickDo) — and since none of these have anything major to do with incoming calls, I think it really comes down to AnyRing being plain unstable.
The concept of making your own ringtones from your own music is a great one, but I feel as though the design and interface were built up too quickly around it. Stability issues aside, the interface and strange design quirks (SMS tones shouldn’t kill songs) make this app feel more like a quick freebie than a paid $3.99 app.
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AnyRing is a jailbreak app available from the Rock Your Phone store.
Rock Your Phone provided a license to Just Another iPhone Blog for the review of AnyRing. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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TAGS: ringtone, rock your phone
