The 7 Best Sites to Download Cool Ringtones That Don’t Suck

Are you sick of the default ringtones that came with your phone? Then don’t put up with those annoying jingles, replace them with some cool ringtones instead.

Whether you’d like to avoid having the same ringtone as everyone around you or want to set custom tones for every contact, these sites provide cool ringtones galore.

1. iRingPro

We begin with a collection of professional sounds that won’t leave you embarrassed if your phone rings during a meeting. The three collections (Origin, Zen, and Tek) are all calm, minimalist sets of ringtones built around a theme, none of which will grate on your nerves.

The creators mention that they were tired of pop songs and annoying sound effects, which is why they created these more respectful themes. They’re professionally produced and were once sold, but are now available for free since one of the co-founders passed away. The surviving owner wanted to honor his memory by making them available at no charge.

You can download the entire iRingPro collection in one ZIP file, formatted for either iOS or Android. There are enough sounds that you could set unique tones for different friends and apps.

As described on the homepage, there are several different types of tones in the package:

• MG (Meeting Grade) are subtler tones good for professional settings.
• AG (Active Grade) tones are stronger and suitable for outdoor use.
• Each tone is available in short and long forms, which have different amounts of silence between rings.
• Some are multi-tone tracks, which change sound after each ring.

2. NASA Audio and Ringtones

If you want to hear humanity reaching for the stars every time your phone rings, NASA’s Audio and Ringtones page is worth checking out. There are some historical bleeps and bloops, or you could stick with classic phrases like “the eagle has landed.”

It’s not for everyone, but space lovers will find a lot of cool ringtones here. You’ll find several categories of audio with both MP3 and M4R (for iPhone) files available.

3. Mob.org Ringtones

If you enjoy a little bit of everything, have a look at Mob’s collection of ringtones. Aside from a few genres on the left side, you’ll mainly navigate this site by browsing through the list and checking out each ringtone individually. Use the search box in the top-right if you want to look for something specific.

By default the site shows New tones, but you can change this to Most Popular or Best of the month. Give it a look and see if anything here suits your fancy. It’s a great option if you’re not looking for anything specific.

4. MyTinyPhone

This site has a staggering amount of content; it offers over 500,000 ringtones to check out. Click one to preview it. By default, the tones are sorted by popularity, but you can use the categories on the left to sort by category.

Click Save to PC on a ringtone’s page to download it as an MP3.

5. Mobiles Ringtones

Here’s another massive collection of ringtones to peruse. It features a lot of iPhone ringtones, which is great if you want the Apple touch on your Android phone.

Otherwise, it’s about what you’d expect from a ringtone site. You can sort by category at the top and preview ringtones before downloading. They’re available in both MP3 and M4R formats.

6. FreeTone

There’s nothing particularly standout about FreeTone, but it offers hundreds of ringtones to check out. It’s always good to have a variety of options on the table, so make sure to give it a look next time you need a new ringtone.

7. Cleartones

Couldn’t find anything you like in the free collections above? Take a look at Cleartones, which offers three sets of minimalist ringtones. They’re designed to be distinctive without distracting you and others.

Cleartones Pure aims to be as simple as possible, while Cleartones Organic is similar but produced with acoustic instruments. Meanwhile, Cleartones Classic closely resembles old-school ringtones but with a lighter touch.

These tones don’t come free, however. Cleartones offers sets of 50 tones for $10 each. You can also purchase a pack of notification sounds for the same price, or get everything on offer in a $35 bundle.

Before you buy, the site lets you hear a sample of each collection. Honestly, we can’t imagine paying for ringtones is worth it for most people these days. But if nothing else, these could inspire you to look for something similar on another site.

Bonus: Video Game Ringtones

While they’re not available on one particular site, if you enjoy retro video games, you have tons of choices for awesome ringtones. Check out our guide to the best free video game ringtones and sounds for some options.

How to Use These Cool Ringtones on Your Phone

Once you’ve downloaded some cool ringtones for your device, you’ll need to know how to use them. Luckily for you that we have full guides for both Android and iOS showing you what to do.

Take a look at how to install and customize your ringtone on Android, which is straightforward once you have the desired files.

If you use an iPhone, you have a bit more work to do. Follow our guide detailing how to import iPhone ringtones with iTunes if you want to use your computer to do this. However, you can also create ringtones using only your iPhone if you prefer.

The Best Ringtone Resources

Thanks to this article you should now know several places to find cool ringtones and use them on your phone. So, don’t settle for generic chimes any longer… your phone should be personalized to your own, individual tastes!

If you didn’t find what you were looking for from these sites, we’ve also covered the best places to download free iPhone ringtones. Or for a classic touch, try some free ringtones that sound like real phones.

Read the full article: The 7 Best Sites to Download Cool Ringtones That Don’t Suck

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Weird Hill

Weird Hill

Doing Your Taxes? 5 Microsoft Excel Formulas You Must Know

It’s two days before your taxes are due. You have a big box of receipts, pay stubs, invoices, and forms. And you don’t want to pay another late fee for filing after the deadline. What do you do?

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You could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on an emergency tax session with an accountant. Or you could leverage the power of Excel to get everything in order. Here are 5 formulas that can make your life easier during tax season.

1. Using VLOOKUP for Tax Tables

The VLOOKUP formula has a very useful optional operator. If that operator is set to FALSE, the formula will return an error if the value that you searched for doesn’t show up.

If it’s set to TRUE, however, it will return the next smallest number. This is perfect for tax tables. Here’s a hypothetical tax table:

Let’s say you need to get tax information for three different people. This means you’ll need to make the same calculation on three different incomes. Let’s use VLOOKUP to speed up the process. Here’s the syntax we’ll use:

=VLOOKUP(A2, A1:B6, 2, TRUE)

A2 is the income amount, A1:B6 is the range of cells that contains the tax rates, The number 2 indicates that we want values from the second column returned, and TRUE tells the formula that it should round down if it doesn’t find an exact match.

Here’s what happens when we run it on cells that contain $37,000, $44,000, and $68,000 for income values:

As you can see, the formula returned the proper tax rate for all three. Multiplying the tax rate by the total income is simple, and will give you the amount of tax that you owe on each amount.

It’s important to remember that VLOOKUP rounds down if it doesn’t find the exact value it’s looking for. Because of this, if you set up a table like the one I have here, you need to have the maximum income listed in the range.

VLOOKUP can be extremely powerful. You can use the power of many Excel formulas to do some pretty amazing things.

2. The IF Formula for Multiple Thresholds

Some tax credits depend on how much money you’ve made. For these credits, nesting IF statements and other boolean operators can make it easy to figure out exactly how much you can claim back.

We’ll use the Earned Income Credit (EIC) to create an example. I’ve highlighted the relevant part of the EIC table here (the four rightmost columns are for married couples filing jointly, and the four to their left are for single filers):

Let’s write a statement that will determine how much we can claim back via EIC:

=IF(AND(A2 >= 36800, A2 < 36850), 1137, IF(AND(A2 >= 36850, A2 < 36900), 1129, IF(AND(A2 >= 36900,  A2 < 36950), 1121, IF(AND(A2 >= 36950, A2 < 37000), 1113, "double check"))))

Let’s break this down a bit. We’ll take just a single statement that looks like this:

=IF(AND(A2 >= 36800, A2 < 36850), 1137, 0)

Excel first looks at the AND statement. If both of the logical operators in the AND statement are true, it will return TRUE and then return the [value_if_true] argument, which in this case is 1137.

If the AND statement returns FALSE (if A2 = 34,870, for example), the formula returns the [value_if_false] argument, which in this case is 0.

In our actual example, we’ve used another IF statement for the [value_if_false], which lets Excel keep running through IF statements until one of them is true.

If your income makes it through the final statement without being in any of those ranges, it will return the string “double check”. Here’s what it looks like in Excel:

In many cases, you can use VLOOKUP to speed this process up. However, understanding nested IF statements can help you in many situations that you’re likely to come across. And if this is something you do often, you could build a financial spreadsheet template with these kinds of formulas built-in for reuse.

3. Calculating Interest Paid With ISPMT

Knowing how much interest you’ve paid on a loan can be valuable when you’re doing your taxes, but if your bank or lender doesn’t give you this information it can be hard to figure out. Fortunately, providing ISPMT with a bit of information will calculate it for you. Here’s the syntax:

=ISPMT([rate], [period], [nper], [value])

[rate] is the interest rate per payment period, [period] is the period for which the interest will be calculated (for example, if you’ve just made your third payment, this will be 3). [nper] is the number of payment periods that you’ll take to pay the loan off. [value] is the value of the loan.

Let’s say you have a $250,000 mortgage that has an annual interest rate of 5%, and that you’ll pay it off in 20 years. Here’s how we’ll calculate how much you’ve paid after the first year:

=ISPMT(.05, 1, 20, 250000)

When you run this in Excel, you get a result of $11,875 (as you can see, I’ve set this up as a table and selected the values from there).

If you use this for monthly payments, be sure to convert the annual interest rate to monthly interest. For example, finding the amount of interest paid after the third month of a one-year loan of $10,000 and an interest rate of 7% would use the following formula:

=ISPMT((.7/12), 3, 12, 10000)

4. Turning Nominal Interest Into Annual Interest With EFFECT

Calculating the actual annual interest rate of a loan is a great financial skill to have. When you’re given a nominal interest rate that compounds a number of times throughout the year, it can be tough to know exactly what you’ll be paying. EFFECT will help you figure it out.

=EFFECT([nominal_rate], [nper])

[nominal_rate] is the nominal rate of interest, and [nper] is the number of times the interest is compounded throughout the year. We’ll use the example of a loan with a nominal interest rate of 7.5% compounded quarterly.

=EFFECT(.075, 4)

Excel gives us 7.71%, the effective annual interest rate. This information can be used with a number of other formulas that use interest rates to determine how much you’ve paid or how much you owe. It can also be useful if you’re using Excel to set up a personal budget.

5. Depreciating Assets With DB

Excel includes a number of different depreciation formulas, but we’ll take a look at DB, the fixed declining balance method. Here’s the syntax:

=DB([cost], [salvage], [life], [period])

The [cost] argument represents the initial cost of the asset, [salvage] is the value of the asset at the end of the depreciation period, [life] is the number of periods over which the asset will depreciate, and [period] is the period number that you want to get information for.

Interpreting the results of the DB statement can be a bit complicated, so we’ll look at a series of data. We’ll take an asset with an initial cost of $45,000 that will depreciate to $12,000 over the course of eight years. Here’s the formula:

=DB(45000, 12000, 8, 1)

I’ll be iterating this formula eight times, so the final argument will be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in consecutive rows. Here’s what happens when we do that:

The number in the Depreciation column is the amount of value that’s been lost. So to see the value of the investment at the end of the year, you’ll need to subtract the number in the Depreciation column from the investment’s value at the beginning of that year.

To get the value at the end of year one, we subtract $6,840 from $45,000 and get $38,160. To get the value at the end of year two, we subtract $5,800.32 from $38,160 and get $32,359.68, and so on.

Excel at Doing Your Taxes

These five formulas are among the huge number available and should help you get a good start on using the power of Excel to get your taxes done. If you’re more comfortable why not learn how to record a macro in Excel and let your sheets do the work for you?

If you’re not a fan of Excel, you can also use the money management tools in Google Drive. And don’t forget that there are a lot of other great resources out there, including quite a few useful tools from the IRS and a wide range of downloadable Excel programs.

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