Travel Technology - How to make your own iPhone Ringtone and transfer it to your iPhone directly?

How to make your own iPhone Ringtone and transfer it to your iPhone directly?

Welcome to FT, zzyjetty521!

You can probably find detailed step-by-step instructions by searching Google for something like your thread title, but here's the quick and dirty on how I do it:

1) Open an unprotected sound file (MP3, WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless, unprotected AAC, etc.) in iTunes
2) Show Info on the audio track in iTunes and adjust the start/stop times so the length of the played audio is 30 seconds or less and has the part of the file you want as your ringtone (skip this step if the audio file is already less than 30 seconds long)
3) Ensure your import settings are configured to AAC (I think the bit rate doesn't matter)
4) Select the audio track you made the adjustments to and choose Convert To AAC (this will result in a new file of the length you selected)
5) Find this file in the Mac OS X Finder or Windows Explorer (right click on the song and choose "Show Original File") and change the file extension from .m4a to .m4r (you may need to enable showing file extensions)
6) Double click the newly renamed file. It should now open in iTunes in the Ringtones section. When you sync your phone, it should sync over (if syncing ringtones is enabled).

You can skip steps 1-5 if you already have a sound file in unprotected AAC format that's less than 30 seconds long and just rename the original (or make a copy in Windows/Finder and rename the copy) with a .m4r extension.

Moving this thread to Travel technology.


______________________

Cholula
CommunityBuzz! Co-Moderator

jackal:

great summary, followup question.

i have a ringtone that someone gave me but it is 48 seconds long. it is in the ringtone section of iTunes but it won't sync to my iPhone. i clicked info and enable to shorten the length of ringtone by adjusting start time and stop time.

it's already labeled at m4r.

any ideas or suggestions how to make it work?

any ideas or suggestions how to make it work?

Rename the file extension from .m4r to .m4a and then proceed as per jackal's suggestions. I don't have an iPhone so I can't try this, but I bet it will work.

Rename the file extension from .m4r to .m4a and then proceed as per jackal's suggestions. I don't have an iPhone so I can't try this, but I bet it will work.
Yep. The actual audio file has to be 30 seconds or shorter. Editing the start/stop times doesn't affect the length of the file itself (which is why the 48-second file won't sync to the iPhone), but it will affect the length of a converted copy of the file made from a track set with start/stop times (if that makes sense).

Follow wdwright's suggestion and it should work.

Yep. The actual audio file has to be 30 seconds or shorter.

I thought it was 40 seconds?

I just created a 40 second ringtone for my 3gs and it works.

Similar instructions found on cnet.