Why are t-Jays great?

Our favourite set of premium Jays headphones comes in the form of the t-Jays Three Dynamic High-Fidelity Earphones.  What makes these mobile phone accessories so special is that not only do they provide a superior listening experience than other headphones in the same price range, but they also focus as much importance on the look of the headphones.

t-Jays Three Dynamic High-Fidelity Earphones

Featuring a powerful neodymium driven 10mm speaker, the t-Jays provide unbeatable bass response and perfectly clear trebles; meaning you can listen to your music in the quality it’s made for.

In order to make the t-Jays the most comfortable headphones available, the manufacturers combined an angled sound tube and a flat design; meaning they can be worn both in the standard earphone position and anchored behind your ears.  The t-Jays also give you the option to extend the cable from 60cm to 130cm, so they’re excellent headphones to use on the go or whilst exercising.

Another innovative feature of the Jays headphones is that they include five different sets of silicone sleeves, ensuring the best possible earphone fit and comfort.  The t-Jays also come complete with an airplane adapter, stereo splitter, travel case and extension cable.

The offer and how to claim…

To celebrate the success of their headphone ranges Jays are running a special offer:  If you buy any pair of t-Jays headphones from Mobile Fun you get a free £10 iTunes voucher!  The offer ends on Sunday July 31st, and you must claim your voucher before the end of August 2011.

Our full range of  Jays headphones

To claim your iTunes voucher simply print off the image below, fill it in and send it off with a copy of your receipt to the address on the form.

Jays iTunes voucher Redemption Print out

iTunes is one of the easiest ways to download and organise your music if you use an iPod or iPhone – but what if you use iTunes to organise and play your music and don’t have an iPod or iPhone?

I’m sure that most of us don’t know that you can sync pretty much any phone with iTunes. Generally speaking, you’ll get a software disc in with your phone that will have a program on for copying your music to your phone, but this can sometimes be clumsy, lead to duplicate songs on your computer, or require your songs to be changed to a different format, but there are ways around this.

I recently came across 2 free programs, (one for Windows, one for Mac OS X) that will let you sync just about any phone with iTunes.

iTunes Agent for Windows users:

This is a simple and easy program to use. It doesn’t matter what phone you have, as long as your PC can recognise it as a storage device once you’ve plugged it into a USB port.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the program, you just need to tell it:

1. How to organise the music on your phone:
   • iTunes saves it in the format: Artist / Album Name / Song.mp3
   • Artist Folder saves in the format: Artist-Album / Song.mp3
   • Flat saves in the format: Artist – Song.mp3
2. Where the music should be saved to on your phone
3. Which playlists you want to synchronise with your phone

That’s about all there is to it. It really couldn’t be easier. Further instructions on how to use it can be found on the iTunes Agent support website.

It’s actually pretty simple, and even more importantly its free and legal! All you need to create your own ringtones is iTunes on a PC or Mac and a song in either MP3 or AAC format that is DRM free. DRM files are normally songs that have been purchased online from places such as the iTunes Store, or imported to your computer using Windows Media Player.

Change import Settings to AAC

Before you start, you need to check some settings in iTunes. In the Preferences window, click on “Import Settings” on the General Tab and make sure that “import using” is set to AAC Encoder.

Show File Extensions

This step is important! If you’re on a PC, you’ll need to make sure that you can view file extensions (music files should show .mp3 or .m4a after the filename). If your PC doesn’t, you can change this by opening your “My Documents” folder, and clicking Tools-> Folder Options. On the “View” tab, you should see an option “Hide extensions for known file types,” Make sure that the box next to this is not ticked, and then hit ok.

Right, now for the fun bit. Find the song you want as your ringtone and play it in iTunes. iPhone ringtones can be a maximum of 30 seconds long, so you’ll need to know the start and end points for the song clip that you want to use, so play the song, and write down how many seconds there are to the part of the song you want as your ringtone. You’ll need the end time too, but this can only be a maximum of 30 seconds.

Select Start and End Times

By now, you should have the start and end points of your ringtone. Right click on the song in iTunes, and select “Get Info”

When the iTunes preferences window opens, you will see 7 tabs across the top, click on the options tab. You’ll see there is a space to enter start and stop times. Put in the times you wrote down earlier and make sure that both boxes are ticked – then hit “OK”.

UPDATE: Thanks to Dean and Snatch for pointing out that you need to ensure that you use : to seperate minutes and seconds, and not a full stop!

Create AAC File

Right click your song again, and this time select create AAC version (or similar.)

UPDATE: In the latest version of iTunes (Version 9.1) the ‘create AAC version’ option has been moved from the right click menu to the ‘Advanced’ menu at the top of the screen.

You should then see a second copy of the song appear in your iTunes music library. In order to change it to a ringtone you’ll need to drag this file to your desktop. You can then delete the 30 second version from iTunes and un tick the start and stop times on the original song.

Rename file to .m4r

Go to the file on your desktop and you should see its called “songname.m4a”. Right click it and choose “rename,” all we want to change here is the .m4a to .m4r. You can rename this song if you want, but the filename must end .m4r

iTunes Ringtone Library

That’s it! All you need to do now is double click the file to add it back to iTunes. If you click on the Ringtones link in the side panel, it should now be listed as a ringtone, rather than a music file.

Sync your iPhone with iTunes

All that is left is to sync your iPhone with your computer. If it doesn’t sync over straight away, make sure the “Sync ringtones” option is selected when your phone is connected.

UPDATE:A few people have had a problem with the ringtones showing in iTunes in the ringtones section, but they aren’t syncing to the phone. To fix this plug your phone in, and on the options screen, uncheck the ‘Sync Ringtones’ box, hit apply and then sync your phone. Once it’s finished, disconnect and re connect your phone. Go back to the options screen and re-check the ‘Sync Ringtones’ box and sync again. This resets the sync information in iTunes and your phone and your ringtones should now show up on your phone.

Download a printable instruction sheet (PDF: 300kb)

Give it a try and let me know how you get on – Got any great ringtones that you want to share with the world? Leave your comments below with the Song title and start/end times and share your creations!