I'm sure we all love our iPhone. But I'm also sure that a lot of users wish it had other more useful features as well. One such feature is having the ability to create our own custom ringtones. We've already paid so much money for the phone itself so I'll be damned if I need to dish out more money to buy a 30 second (usually less) audio clip. If you already own a MP3 track in your music collection that you wish could be used as your ringtone, than you're in luck. Turns out creating a custom ring tone for our iPhone from scratch is not as hard as it seems.
You may also view the tutorial video. The steps are the same as written here.
There are four things you need.
1. An MP3 track you wish to use as your custom ringtone
2. Audacity (if you need instructions on how to install Audacity along with the LAME MP3 encoder, than read this article)
3. iTunes
4. An iPhone
Creating the Ringtone
1. First we open Audacity and drag our MP3 track into the main program area. The iPhone restricts our ringtone time limit to only 30 seconds (I'm not sure if there is a work-around for this limitation so if someone reading does know of one, please share it!) Therefore, we need to use Audacity to chop it up to get only the audio clip we desire and getting rid of everything else. Once the audio clip has loaded, simply find the clip you want to keep (remember, under 30 seconds). Highlight all the audio parts before the starting mark and hit Delete. Now highlight all the audio part after where you want your ring tone to stop and hit Delete again. Now you should only have a short audio clip which comprises of your entire ring tone. If you make a mistake, simply start over.
As a sidenote, your original MP3 track will not be altered by following this article. If you want insurance, than create a backup copy just in case.
Once you get the audio clip to sound exactly how you want it to, then its time to export it. Go into the File menu and select Export to MP3. I recommend saving the file to your desktop for easy retrieval. You can give the file any name you wish to. It doesn't matter. Once you see the track on your desktop, play it back to make sure once again, it sounds exactly the way you want it to. If you are satisfied, then close out on Audacity and select No in the resulting dialog box.
2. It's now time to fire up iTunes for the conversion process. Select the Music category and drag your newly created MP3 track into the library. Now simply right click on the track in iTunes and select the 'Create AAC Version' from the menu.
You should then see a new file created right under the original. Since we no longer need the MP3 version, we can simply delete it from our library to avoid confusion. The MP3 version should be the track on top. The bottom track is the newly created AAC version so make sure not to delete that one! If you feel like it, you can actually delete the actual MP3 track you created in step 1 as well from your desktop because we won't be needing it again.
Next, we want to work with the new AAC version of your ringtone track so this time, drag the track out of iTunes and onto your desktop. You'll see the same track (with the original file name) but this time, it has an extension of .m4a. The iPhone doesn't accept this format for a ring tone, however. Instead, we need to turn it into a compatible format and to do that, we simply change the file extension from .m4a to .m4r by using the Rename option when we right click on the file.
Before:
After:
3. Once you rename the file extension, then all that is left is to import it back to iTunes. This time, rather than importing the track back into the Music category, we need to drag and drop the .M4R file into the Ringtones section instead. If you want to rename the ringtone, you can do so after the import. Click once on the ringtone, wait a second, and then click on it again to rename.
4. Plug in your iPhone and sync away! That's all there is to it!
I really hope whoever reading this article gets something out of it. Creating custom iPhone ringtones is nothing new I can assure you that much. There are probably numerous other articles and videos out there on the Internet that says the same thing as I've said here. Whatever the case may be, I just want everyone to stop spending so much money on ringtones when you can simply make them yourselves! If using stock MP3 files for ringtone is not your thing, you certainly can use other third party tools to spice up and remix your own tracks before once again, following this tutorial to create the ringtone. As long as your original source file is an MP3, this tutorial will always work. Have fun!
