Apple has been selling iPhone ringtones for some of your favorite songs for some time now, but you don’t need to spend money on songs you already own. This is even more true now that iTunes Plus is becoming the standard amongst songs purchased from the iTunes Store. Now your songs are setup DRM free and ready for you to customize as you would like.
In addition to selling media that can be modified to an iPhone ringtone, Apple also provides you with the tools to make the changes to the songs. All you need is a computer (PC or Mac) and iTunes.
Create Ringtones With iTunes
To make your own Ringtones with iTunes:
- Find the song you’d like to make into a ringtone and right click (command+click). Select Get Info and click the Options Tab. Ringtones are 40 seconds long so change the Start and Stop time listed to the 40 seconds of the song that you’d like to set as your ringtone. Be sure the Stop time is checked.
- After you’ve change the start and stop times, return to the iTunes song list and right click again on the song you’d like to make a ringtone. Select “Create AAC Version”.
- If everything has worked correctly you’ll see a 40 second version of the song you’ve been working with. We’ll use the 40 second version of the song to finish creating the ringtone.
- Next, I suggest opening the song in Finder and locating the version of the song with a .m4a extension. We’ll need to modify that in the next few steps. Return to iTunes, find the 40 second version of the song and remove it from the library.
- After the warning screen appears, select “Keep File” and return to the finder location of the .m4a version of the song we just created
- Select the .m4a version of the song we created and rename the extension to .m4r. This will make it read to be imported into iTunes as a ringtone.
- Return to iTunes and select your Ringtone library. Drag the song with the .m4r extension from Finder to the Ringtone library. It should now sync with your iPhone and work like all your other iPhone ringtones.
Now you can take your continually growing iTunes library and transform any song into the perfect iPhone ringtone for your friends, family, and other contacts. A future article will include additional details about how to customize iPhone ringtones so be sure to check back at Maciverse for all the details.
Related posts:
- Quick Tip: Remove Duplicate Songs from iTunes
- Sync iTunes Playlists With Your Nexus One
- The iLife series, #5: iTunes Screensavers
- Create Free MP3s With Google Music Search
- Listen to Local Radio Stations on Your iPhone
[...] thanks to this great blog post, we can now convert iTunes songs into [...]
This blog post is phenomenal!! I put it on my iPhone blog as well. I’ve wanted to know how I could do this for a long time. Excellent, excellent post.
Micah – glad the info is helpful! Check back from details on how to customize your ringtones a bit further.
nice write up.. but you waisted your time ..
try this .. its huge… http://audiko.net/en.html
upload your song or pick up one of the already uploaded ones
select the exact spot of music that you want to hear
fade in, fade out if you want to have some…
download the song as iphone ringtone…
can be done by a three y o kid within a minute or so
Pieter – I disagree… uploading a track to a 3rd party site, picking track points, and then downloading again takes more time than the method I described.
nice. I’ve read a few of these tutorials now and yours is by far the easiest to understand .
Very easy tutorial, just found it. I will link from my blog to it. Thanks guys for sharing.
Thanks goodness Apple removed DRM protection from iTunes, that removes a step from the process. I’d like to add that many people don’t have a bluetooth to transfer their ringtones to their phone so they’ll to use an app like Data pilot to copy any music files from your hard drive (usually in “My Documents/My Music” on Windows) to your phone.