iPhone: Create Your Own Ringtones

Admit it, you want some cool ringtones on your phone but you don’t want to pay for them.  It also sucks that Apple wants to charge you a buck for a 30 second sound file.  There is some good news for you; you don’t have to pay for ringtones any more.

The process isn’t difficult and should only take you a few minutes from start to finish.  Let’s start by picking an .mp3 to convert to a new ringtone.

Add your .mp3 to your iTunes Music Library by dragging it into the iTunes interface.

Once the song is added to your collection, you need to figure out where you would like your ringtone to start.  If you start playing your song, pay attention to the timer.

When you find your starting point for the ringtone, stop the song from playing, right click on it, choose Get Info, then choose the Options tab.

If you look closely, you will notice options for Start Time and Stop Time.  Here, you will check both boxes and populate the Start Time with your new ringtone’s starting point and make the Stop Time 30 seconds longer.

Now that we have that out of the way, we need to convert the .mp3 to something we can work with, an .m4a.  Lets make sure iTunes is setup properly to do this.