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.
