Creating and Installing New Ringtones on the iPhone

Customization and personalization has become a huge part of personal computers and the web. It makes sense that cellphones should offer up the abilities to do what the average person does on their computer such as surfing the web, playing games and running applications. Cellphones are now coming with all this functionality and are being followed by customizable features to almost anything a user wants to change. The iPhone is a perfect example of these changes taking place. It offers up many applications and games to the consumer allowing him or her to pick what is best for their needs. Many of these games and applications cost money, however some are created and distributed for free by the average iPhone user; ringtones are no different. Anyone can create a custom ringtone from the music they already own and without any cost. This tutorial covers exactly how to create and import a custom ringtone on to the iPhone.

PICKING THE MUSIC

The ringtone can be forty seconds long thus a selection of the music needs to be chosen. This can be done in iTunes. The first thing that needs to be done is to change iTunes import settings.

Go to Edit and select Preferences.

On the General tab, select Import Settings and click on the the top drop-down menu.

Select “AAC Encoder” then click ok and exit out of the Preferences window.

Find the music or audio that will be the new ringtone. If it is not already in iTunes then just import it or drag-and-drop the music file over iTunes music library.

Right-click on the music file and Click on Get Info. This will bring up a window with several tabs at the top.

Click on the Options tab. On this tab there will be two fields that say “Start Time” and “Stop Time.”

These fields determine where the music starts and stops playing. The selection can be up to forty seconds long. Determine the start time and stop time of the selection of music for the ringtone and enter the time into the two fields.

CONVERTING AND IMPORTING

The last step is to convert and import the selection of music and place it on the iPhone.

Right-click the song and click on “Create AAC Version.” This will create another copy of the song that is as long as the start and stop time recently specified.

iTunes itself will not convert the song to a ringtone, so instead iTunes needs to be tricked into importing it as a ringtone. This is done by copying-and-pasting the newly converted song to a folder on the hard-drive and changing the file extension.

Right-click the song that was just pasted and choose Rename.

Rename the extension of the song from “.m4a” to “.m4r” and then drag-and-drop the song into the ringtones section of iTunes.

Make sure to paste it into iTunes ringtone section and not the iPhone’s otherwise problems will crop up when trying to add multiple custom ringtones.

Once the ringtone has been imported into iTunes, drag it to the ringtones section of the Iphone.

The ringtone should now be installed on the Iphone.