How to Create An iPhone Ringtone Using iTunes For Free
The iPhone is an awesome smartphone and I’ve been in love with it ever since I got it.
The iTunes app store is just one of the many benefits of using the iPhone and it is amazing to see and use all the innovative applications being developed by third party developers.
However, if you talk about Apple as a company, they’ve had a pretty tight control over the iPhone platform and that is my only gripe with it. Apple’s control over the iPhone ecosystem is so much that they charge you to even create ring tones for the iPhone even if you have purchased the song legally through iTunes, and for a lot of people paying for ringtones is the only way to get ringtones for the otherwise excellent phone.
In today’s tutorial we’ll show you how you can create a ringtone for your iPhone for free using nothing but iTunes and a little perseverance.
To start with creating your own iPhone ringtone, open iTunes and select the song that you want to make a ringtone out of.
Right click and select “Get Info“. Go to the “Options” tab select a “Start Time” and “Stop Time” . This will ensure that iTunes will play the song starting from the “Start Time” to the “Stop Time”. Make sure that the stop time doesn’t exceed the start time by more than about 40 seconds. To be on the safer side, I usually keep the length at 30 seconds.
You can uncheck the start and stop time settings after you’ve created your ring tone.
Now, go to Edit->Preferences and in the General tab click on Import settings
And make sure that the AAC encoder settings are set to the following.
Now, right click on the song that you’d selected in the beginning and create an AAC version out of it.
You should now see two songs with the same name in iTunes but one of them would be of 30 seconds duration (or the duration that you chose for the ringtone), while the other one would be the full original song. We’re almost done now.
Select the newly created 30 second AAC version of the song in iTunes and press CTRL+C. Paste the song on your desktop (or any other folder) using the CTRL+V shortcut. This AAC version of the song will have the .M4A extension. Change it to .M4R.
Now, with the iPhone connected to your computer. Simply drag this file to the iPhone icon in iTunes.
That’s it. Your newly created ringtone should now be visible in the iPhone and you can start using it rightaway.
Tags: iPhone, itunes, Ringtones
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[Click to close]71 Responses
Hello, 1st and foremost I’d like to thank you guys for the tutorial. I however have a similar problem as some people here have posted. I just got my iphone 3GS, and followed the steps word by word. Once dragged into the Iphone’s ringtones folder it shows in my mac’s itunes, however…It won’t show anywhere in my Iphone period. Am I missing something?
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Same here. I could do it few months ago. But I cant do it anymore now. It appeared in Itunes under my Iphone ringtone that the music files are in Iphone ringtone section. But I couldnt see it anywhere in my Iphone, in the setting (you know)… Is it because i just updated my iphone software to version 3.1 ???
Can you please advise us? Cheers.
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Larks Reply:
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:34 am
Did you put Ringtone in the album title? That worked for me. My question is can I start the time anywhere in the song? I can only make it work for the first 30 seconds of a song…. Thanks
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It doesnt work with Itunes 9 i found out so if anyone can figure out a new way that would be awesome
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All those who’re having problems following the guide, please start over again and follow the instructions again. The steps can be a bit confusing at times. Also, just read the first few comments and that should help since some others have also faced problems with this hack and solved them.
If nothing else works, come back and I’ll see if I can help.
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Gina Reply:
October 24th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Thanks so much for the step by step. I have itunes 9 and iphone 3g with 3.1, and everything goes smoothly with the instructions up until the last step where it gets moved to the iphone. i get the dreaded circle with the cross through it. it lets me put it up in the music library just fine, but not on the iphone. any ideas?? again, THANKS!!
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Me again, I found my own answer on the ehow site. The last step given above didn’t work for my versions of itunes/iphone (see my post above).
What I had to do was simply double click the file I created on my desktop, then sync. It was that easy. It worked really well!!
Here’s where I found this method: http://www.ehow.com/how_2160460_custom-iphone-ringtones-free.html
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Hi, I am having problems converting the added file from M4a to M4r. When I rename the file it renames it as filename.m4r.m4a
I was wondering if its my windows setup that it does not show me the .m4a part of the file and if you have any suggestions how to fix it it will be appreciated.
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I have iTunes 9 and it worked when I dragged the file into my iTune’s ringtones section, not my iPhones ringtones section. I then synced the ringtones to my phone and its done! Thanks so much!
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