TechNote 7 – iPhone Ringtones

A quick note on creating your own Ringtones for your iPhone from music in iTunes. This also works for Alarm sounds when you get fed up with waking up to Marimba!

This is definitely not as easy as it should be and there may be simpler ways, but this should work.

  1. Start iTunes and find the song you want to convert. (It must be an MP3.)
  2. Right-click the song and choose Get Info.
  3. Click the Options tab.
  4. Check the Start Time and Stop Time boxes, then enter times for each (no more than 30 seconds apart, the maximum length for a ringtone).
  5. Click OK, then right-click the song again and choose Create AAC Version. You should immediately see a new 30-second version of the song. If the Create AAC Version option isn’t there, try the Advanced menu. If its not there either, check your Preferences->General->Import Settings… and ensure you have Import Using set to AAC Encoder.
  6. Drag that version out of iTunes and into the folder of your choice.
  7. Delete the 30-second version from iTunes and undo the Start Time/Stop Time changes to the original.
  8. Open the folder containing the 30-second AAC file you dragged out of iTunes, then change the file extension from .m4a to .m4r.
  9. Double-click it and it immediately gets added to iTunes’ ringtone library.
  10. Finally, sync your iPhone. When it’s done, you can head into the settings and select your new ringtone.
This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 3:32 pm. 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.

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