# How to make pop-free, crisp two-beep ringtone?

I hope this ultra-noob question is not entirely out of place here.

I'm trying to make a super simple ringtone: 0.5s silence + 1s "pure tone" + 0.5s silence + 1s "pure tone" + 0.5s silence. By "pure tone" I mean something like a sinusoidal or square wave with a fixed frequency (let's say 350Hz for concreteness). This profile results in a very standard beep-beep ringtone.

With Audacity, it's relatively simple to generate this profile (with Generate > Silence... and Generate > Tone...), and one even has a choice of wave shapes (sinusoidal, square, etc.).

If I pick the sinusoidal option when constructing the profile above, and export it as a WAV file, when I play the ringtone in my phone, I can hear a slight "pop" at the beginning of each beep.

I've tried to get rid of those pops, with little success. I figure that the pops are an artifact of the discontinuity of the wave at the beginning of each beep (though, curiously, I don't hear a pop at the end of each beep). So I tried fading the sound in and out, which does get rid of the pop, but, as one would expect, makes the beeps sound less crisp.

I've heard many ringtones of this sort that are crisp, pleasant-sounding, and pop-free, so there must be a way to get rid of these pops. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

P.S. If I pick the square wave + no aliasing option (which, to my ear sounds a little "cleaner" than the option with aliasing, for some reason), the resulting ringtone does not have the "pop" at the beginning of each beep, but it sounds very harsh and loud. I tried to adjust the loudness of the beep by lowering the amplitude of the wave generated by Audacity, and in fact, when Audacity plays this reduced-amplitude wave it indeed sounds quieter, but when it is saved as a ringtone in my phone, the phone plays both versions of the square-wave ringtone equally loudly. I figure that the phone probably normalizes the ringtone's loudness somehow. What's surprising to me is that the ringtone made with the sinusoidal wave (the one with the slight "pops" at the beginning of each beep) sounds considerably less loud than the ringtones made with the square wave. In any case, even if I could find a way to reduce the volume of the square-wave ringtone that the phone did not "normalize away", I still would prefer a pop-free version of the sinusoidal-wave ringtone.

• fade them in and out Apr 1, 2013 at 1:01