Manaccom Ringtone Studio 2

Philosopher Rene Descartes once said "I think therefore I am", however it is something very far from thought that defines us today. In fact, the artist Andy Warhol probably said it better when he said "I am a deeply superficial person". Clothes, music and technology all give an outward impression of who we are, but nothing says 'this is me' better, especially to the person next to you on the bus, than a loud, in-your-face ringtone.

However, with all the phones in the world there just aren't enough default ringtones to set you aside from the pack, which is where a software package like Manaccom's Ringtone Studio 2 comes into play. It's a very basic package that allows you to import sounds or songs and export them to your phone via a number of transfer methods, such as infrared, Bluetooth, USB or WAP. Ringtone Studio 2 will export a few file formats, including WAV, MP3 and SMAF/MMF.

It's true that many phones these days will simply download MP3s you've created on your PC and set them as a ringtone. However, if you want something a little fancier, perhaps a series of quotes from your favourite movie or TV show, and you're not especially computer literate, Ringtone Studio 2 is an option. In fact, Ringtone Studio 2's packaging and online press material say the product is "buffoon" friendly, catering for everyone.

It's a simple application with simple means. You can take any CD, audio file or audio source on your PC and import it to Ringtone Studio 2, including MP3s or even your own voice. Once the audio is imported you see it in a wave form across the bottom of the application. It is here that you do your cutting and editing before saving the final product and exporting it. The three editing tools include volume adjustment and fade in or out. Once you're finished you hit the export button and off you go.

Unfortunately it's not the most refined piece of software and we encountered a number of problems, which tended to get frustrating at times, especially when it wouldn't do something it was meant to. For instance, moving the curser to a new point in the track often didn't work the way it should. Since this is one of the most basic functions, we were quite disappointed to see the glitch. We also found that the software would lock up on one of our two installations, forcing us to close it, and we weren't able to adjust the volume on either installation. In this regard, despite its simplicity, computer illiterate users may still get very frustrated and the rest of us will probably follow suit.

The software does have its own automatic updater, so hopefully bugs like this can be patched out in the future. However, throughout our tests we barely got to achieve what we set out to achieve. The automatic updater corrupted the application and required a re-install. The application locked up on a number of occasions and when we tried to export to MP3 on one of our systems the application was missing the required codec. It would not explain how to download it, or explain which codec was required; not a very good situation for "buffoons". We did eventually manage to get a file exported, but were disappointed by the difficulties.