Animation Mentor Student
Getting custom ringtones for the iPhone can be an annoying process. Many laymen may end up buying ringtones on iTunes simply to save trouble, but its simply not worth it to have to pay to let iTunes do the relatively simple work of converting it to a ringtone. You supposedly own the song after paying the $1.00 or so price of admission, so why in the world should you have to buy it again to listen to it as a 30 second clip during phone calls? It’s ridiculous. In addition, using iTunes “Create Ringtone” feature doesn’t even allow you to convert songs that you got from places other than the iTunes Store. I’ve had friends ask me how to make custom ringtones for the iPhone before, so I felt it would be worthwhile to share this knowledge with a wider audience.
I’m certainly nowhere near the first to do this; I learned most of this trick from http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-use-itunes-to-create-a-ringtone-for-your-iphone/. However there are several details that are left out that I will include in this guide. This may or may not be the simplest way to make ringtones, but I can personally guarantee that it works.
1. The first thing you’ll want to do is to make sure you are using the AAC encoder in iTunes. Check this by navigating to “Edit>Preferences>General>Import Settings” within iTunes. Make Sure Import Using: “AAC Encoder” is selected.
2. Find the song you want to make into a ringtone.
3. Right click on the name, choose “Get Info.”
4. Under the Options tab, choose which 30 seconds (or less) you want to use from the song (ringtones cannot exceed this length). By typing in a start and stop time. Make sure the checkboxes for each of these are checked. Once you have verified that this is the time range you want, click “OK.”
5. Then simply right-click the song and choose “Create AAC Version”.
6. A Quick Note: Don’t forget to change your original song back to its proper length so that you can listen to it normally. The easiest way to do this is to just uncheck the Start Time and Stop Time boxes you checked earlier.
7. Once the conversion is completed (it should be pretty instantaneous), a 30 second (or whatever length you created) song of the same name will appear in your iTunes playlist.
8. Now, find your iTunes music folder on your computer (not in iTunes). The quickest way to do this is to right click the song clip in iTunes and select “Show in Windows Explorer.” This will open a window with your new ringtone.
9. The clip should have a file extension of .m4a. Simply rename the extension to .m4r, then double-click it. It will automatically be added as a ringtone in your iTunes library. NOTE: If you cannot see your file extension, you will need to change your windows setting to show it. To do this go to Folder Options (this is under Control Panel in Windows Vista and 7, Windows Explorer Tools in Windows XP), click the View tab, and uncheck “Hide extensions for known file types.” Now your file names will show and allow you to rename extensions.
10. Sync Your iPhone with iTunes as normal and enjoy.