Last week, I wrote about creating your own iPhone ringtones on the Mac. As it turns out, there’s an app called GeoRing out there that lets you use your entire iPhone music library as potential ringtones, without the need for syncing with iTunes or any track editing on your part.
GeoRing ($0.99) lets you either specify any song in your library as your ringtone, or allows you to use playlists to set random ringtones for each incoming call. But, as you might have guessed from the name, that’s not all it provides, either. The app will also geotag and log your incoming calls, telling you how long it lasted (to the nearest second) and letting you see where you received it on a built-in Google Map.
GeoRing takes advantage of Apple’s multitasking capabilities (introduced in iOS 4) to function. For it to work, you have to open the app once and select the songs from your library that you’d like to use as ringtones. As long as you don’t reboot your phone or kill the GeoRing app in the multitasking tray on your iPhone, it’ll play one of your selected songs at random whenever you receive an incoming call. The app will play the track over whichever ringtone you’ve selected as your default, but the app’s developer has figured out a way around that limitation. You simply need to download a free silent ringtone from GeoRing’s support site (or create your own), sync it to your iPhone, and set it as your default ringer.
It may not be a perfect solution (you can’t set specific songs as custom ringtones for specific people, and if you forget to relaunch the app after a restart you could miss calls), but it’s the best way to enable access to your entire library as potential ringtones without jailbreaking or time-consuming conversion. It also raises the question of why Apple doesn’t put this right in iOS Settings, if it’s okay with a developer building a complicated workaround. Are iTunes ringtone revenues really that lucrative? Considering that the process for buying them requires almost as much input as creating them yourself in Garage Band, I somehow doubt it.
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