Custom Ringtones on your iPhone Tutorial
December 21, 2007
Well I actually broke down and bought an iPhone after playing with a friends.
And of course I’m trying to figure out how to do all the cool stuff. Yesterday I learned how to make custom ringtones for the iPhone. In this tutorial I will teach you how to also pwn, and make your own custom iPhone ringtone.
Things you will need.
- A audio file you’d like to use as a iphone ringtone, mp3’s work just fine.
- Latest version of iTunes, alternately if you don’t use iTunes to sync your phone you can probably get away with using iPhone explorer or something similar to access the Ringtone folder
- An audio editing software, my laptop had one pre installed
First off there isn’t anything here that’s all that complicated to do you just need to follow the steps and everything will work fine. If you have questions on how to do certain things, leave a comment asking for help or just google around for a tutorial.
iPhone ringtone specs.
The iPhone Ringtone needs to be roughly 30 seconds in length, encoded in AAC format and with the m4r extension.
If you try to put a ringtone that’s too long it will not show up as a ringtone. I don’t know why you can’t have a longer iphone ringtone than 30 seconds, however I do know that long ringtones do not work. And after looking online other people also recommend that the ringtone be no less than 28 seconds. So save yourself the hassle.
Step 1
Assuming that you already have a program to edit audio.
If you don’t there is plenty of software out there. Download.com or Tucows.com are good places to look for software.
Open up your audio editor and load up the song file.
Now using the editor highlight the part of the song you wish to use.
Making sure that it’s a tad under 30 seconds in length.
Copy your selection
Create a new file and paste your selection into the new file.
You should now have an audio file with a little under 30 seconds of audio.
Now lets save that file.
When saving select the .m4a file format.
Now if the software you have can save the file as a m4a aac encoded do that. If not don’t worry that’s what itunes is for.
Correction: You will need to convert the file to .m4a before loading into itunes.
Save the file somewhere you can easily find it as an .m4a .
Step 2
Fire up iTunes. What you want to do here is drag the song into your song list.
If you couldn’t encode the song into aac audio. Right click the song and choose convert selection to aac.
After you do that go back to the folder containing the song and change the file type from a .m4a file to a .m4r file.
Doing that converts the file to a ringtone file that shows up as a ringtone in iTunes.
Next double click the .m4r file. This will cause the file to be played in iTunes and show up in the ringtones folder.
Step 3
Now that we have the ringtone in our iTunes we can do a sync to the iPhone.
Connect your iPhone and click on it in iTunes. Look for the ringtones tab and you should see your new ringtone in that box. Sync your iPhone and wait for the sync to finish.
You should be able to see your new ringtone on your iPhone. Click on the Settings icon -> then sounds -> then ringtone. At the very top of the list there should be a custom ringtone list with your ringtones in it.
Alternately if you want to assign the new ringtone to a contact, as that persons personal ringtone, in your phone book do the following.
Open up a contact and click to edit it.
There is a Ringtone field with an arrow click on that.
Select the custom iphone ringtone you just created.
Click the back link and then click done.
Now after having gone through the steps you should have working iPhone Ringtone. Hopefully people will find this tutorial helpful. Leave some comments if you do or if you have questions.
Thanks.
ps. When I have the chance I will update this tutorial with pics so it can be more helpful.
3 Responses to “Custom Ringtones on your iPhone Tutorial”
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I can’t seem to convert the file from .m4a to .m4r
any suggestions??
-newbie
Hi. in order to convert .m4a to .m4r what you need to do is simply rename the file extension.
If you don’t see the file extension you will need to change your explorer view settings so that they are visible.
Open My Computer, click on Tools, then Folder Options, click on the View tab, uncheck the Hide extensions. Then check Apply to all folders. Then click ok to close.
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