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So you’ve an iPhone. 

Are you going to pay $0.99 for every song you want to convert to a ringtone? Or are you going to pay a one-time fee for a software to do it for you? Better still, how about just converting your current songs to a ringtone for FREE?

There are a coupla ways on the internet, but my personal favourite is this: using iTunes itself! Here’s how.

Step 1: Figuring out the song and song segment you want

1. Select the song you wish to make into a ringtone in iTunes.
2. Play it.
3. Listen hard and determine the starting time and ending time of the song which you wish to convert into a ringtone. The maximum length is only 30 seconds, so take note.
   For example, as you play, you notice the song chorus starts at 0:55 and ends at 1:20. You want the chorus to be your ringtone, so the start time would be 0:55 and the end time is 1:20.

Step 2: Creating the song segment for the ringtone

1. Right click, and select “Get Info“.
2. A little window should come up with lots of tabs. Select the “Options” tab.
3. There should be “Start Time” and “Stop Time” check boxes. Check both of them and enter the start and end times respectively.
4. Click “OK”. You should see your newly created “song” that’s less than 30 seconds in length.

Step 3: Converting the segment to a iPhone ringtone

1. Right click on this newly created song segment and select “Create AAC version”. The song will be re-encoded.
2. Right click on the song again, and select “Show in Finder”. It’ll open up your iTunes directory and you should see the song with a “*.m4a” extension
3. Move them out (say, to the desktop) and rename the extension to “*.m4r”. You can also do this by right-clicking on the file and selecting “Get Info“.
4. Use iTunes to add the file back to your iTunes library again (under the Ringtones section) after deleting it from iTunes. Or, you can just try double-clicking on the new file with the .m4r extension (after deleting it from iTunes).

1. Sync your iPhone again and you should see the new ringtone! Yeah!

Note: if your songs are protected (by DRM), you need to use another method, an Apple-approved method! And it’s available on Apple’s website.

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Tags: iphone ringtones tutorial custom mp3 itunes

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 12:04 am and is filed under Gadgets, High Tech, Mac, New Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.