How To Make An iPhone Ringtone (For Free)

Apple didn't get where they are today without making a few dollars here and there. And like so many other manufacturers they can't help but want to cash in on youngsters who want ringtones.

Ringtones have been around a while and while I can't be bothered to look up the figures, I suspect that many corporations are getting rich selling tiny samples of music for some outrageous price. And quite how a 20 second sample of a song can end up costing more than double the price of the entire song is quite beyond me.

But for those of you who wish to make your own ringtones from a song you already own, this is how you do it. I'm assuming a PC, iPhone 3G, and the current version of iTunes. In time no doubt Apple will try to prevent the method I am about to describe, but for now, this works:

Making A Custom Ringtone For Your iPhone (For Free)

1. Open iTunes, without your iPhone connected to your computer.
   
2. Find a song you want to make into a ringtone.
3. If you purchased the song from iTunes and it is a DRM protected MP4 file, you will need to do some extra work. If it is an unprotected sound file like an MP3 from Amazon.com you can skip to step 6.
4. Burn your protected file onto an audio CD, just as you would do if you intended to listen to it in a CD player.
5. Rip the song back off the CD using iTunes. The song will no longer have that stupid DRM crap on it. There's probably another way to do this, but this one works. If you wish to make multiple ringtones you can put all the songs you want to use on the CD and then rip them back off. Again, this is only necessary if the songs have DRM protection.
   
6. Play the song you want to turn into a ringtone and decide what part of the song you wish to use for your ringtone. Maybe you want the first 25 seconds, maybe you want the chorus. In any case, watch the counter as you play the song in iTunes, and write down the exact time that your desired sample begins and ends. So for example, you might want 22 seconds of a song that begins after 2:04 and ends at 2:26. Make a note of those times (start and end).
   
7. Right click on the song and select Get Info.
8. Click on the Options tab.
9. You will see a box where you can specify the start and end time of the song. Enter the figures you wrote down earlier into those boxes, and make sure the checkmark next to the times is present. This tells iTunes to play only that portion of the song you want as a ringtone. Keep the ring tone less than 40 seconds. (Note: iTunes is actually capable of using fractions of a second if you have to be very accurate.)
10. Click OK.
11. Right click on the song again, and this time select Convert To AAC. A duplicate of your song will be created, but it will be the length of a ring tone, using the numbers you previously specified.
12. Right click on the newly created ringtone and choose delete from the menu.
13. You will see a dialog box open, click keep files.
14. Now you will need to locate the file using Windows Explorer. It will usually be in My Documents > My Music > iTunes. Generally in a folder related to the artist or album the song came from. It will have a file extension of m4a.
15. Right click on the file and select rename.
16. Change the file extension to m4r. You may see a warning message about the evils of changing a file extension name. Ignore it.
17. Once the file has been given the new extension, double click on it. It should automatically be imported into iTunes as a ringtone, appearing in the ringtone folder.
18. Attach your iPhone to your PC and sync. You may have to go to the ringtones tab in the sync operation and ensure that ringtone syncing is enabled.
19. You're done. Your new ringtone should now be available to select on your iPhone.

It sounds more complicated than it is. Once you've done a couple, you'll see how easy it is to use. Not as easy as it would have been if Apple just relaxed and stopped trying to exploit people with over priced ringtones, but still, it works just fine.