My new iPhone 3GS arrived last week, which is the first iPhone I’ve ever owned and I think it will be a long time before I switch to another mobile. I can live with the poor camera as I very rarely take camera photos, and the only feature that might make me upgrade is a larger hard drive as 32GB isn’t enough for me to store my favourite music. My total music collection is about 200GB now, and in my car I have an old 60GB iPod that just manages to hold my key tracks.
One surprise with the iPhone was the fact that you can only use ringtones that are downloaded from the iTunes music store. This is just plain daft, and is one of the reasons I resisted getting an iPhone for so long as I hate the tactics Apple sometimes employ. To make matters even worse, ringtones aren’t on sale for UK users!
After a bit of googling I found a way to make free ringtones (only works with DRM free mp3, ACC and AIFF files):
- Load iTunes 8
- Right click on the song you want to make into a ringtone and select ‘Get info’
- Select ‘Options’ and check both the ‘Start Time’ and ‘End Time’ boxes
- Choose the start and end times for your ringtone clip. It should be 30-40secs in total. A good tip is to listen to the track and find the exact start point you want
- Click ‘ok’
- Keep the song highlighted and click on ‘advanced’ in the menu bar
- Select ‘Create AAC Version’ or ‘Create Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) Lossless Version’ (Make sure your iTunes “Import Settings” are set to “AAC” or “Apple Lossless” and not “MP3″). This creates a duplicate track with your short playing time
- Go back to the original song and uncheck the ‘Start Time’ and ‘End Time’ boxes
- Drag the new duplicate song to the desktop to make a copy, and then delete the duplicate in iTunes
- On your Desktop, rename the file with the ‘.m4r’ file extension. This turns your song file into an iPhone ringtone file. Your ‘songname.m4a’ file should now be named ‘songname.m4r’
- Drag the newly renamed .m4r (songname.m4r) file back into iTunes by dragging the file over the “Library” column and release when “Library” becomes highlighted
- You should now see your new ringtone ready to sync!
Thanks to intomobile for the guide
