After finally getting my company phone, I was confused at being told that I couldn’t change the ring tone (except the ones that come on the phone). However, since the iPhone seems to be a very popular handset these days, it seems crazy that we should all be limited to using the same set of tones for incoming calls. Don’t get me wrong the sounds on the handset are fine, but it gets a bit much when you’re sitting in a London office and your phone goes off and four other people reach for their phones because they think it is their handset ringing.
So will a little bit of time and research I’ve come up with this list of instruction on how to create your own iPhone ringtone. However, the most important thing you should know is that your ringtone sound can only be a maximum of 40 seconds longs, which the phone will loop for you. Any longer than 40 seconds and it just won’t work.
Step 1: Load the original sound file into iTunes (I’m working with iTunes 9)
Step 2: Find out the start and end time indexes for the section of the file that you want to turn into a ringtone (Hint: just play it in iTunes and copy the time indexs from the bar along the top of the screen)
Step 3: Right click on the sound file and select “Get Info”
Step 4: Select the “Options” tab
Step 5: Fill in the start and stop time indexes from the values you noted down in step 2
Step 6: Click “OK” to dismiss the dialog
Step 7: On the general tab click the “Import Settings” button
Step 8: Set the “Import Using:” option to “ACC Encoder”, remember what you had set here before so you can change them back later
Step 9: Close down both dialogs boxes using the “OK” button.
Step 10: From within iTunes, right click on the sound file and select “Create ACC version”.
After the conversion process has finished a new entry in iTunes’ library will appear.
Step 11: Right click on the new version of the sound file and select “Show in Finder”.
Step 12: In iTunes, delete the new version of the file, when prompted if to keep the file or delete that as well select “Keep”
NOTE: You must do step 8, or iTunes won’t import the file back into it’s library in the correct place
Step 13: Move to the finder window that shows the converted sound file and you should see that it has the an extrension of “.m4a”, change this to “.m4r”
Step 14: Double click the file and it will be re-imported to iTunes.
Step 15: Go back to iTunes’ preferences, General Tab, Import Settings and change the options back to what you original set them as
Step 16: Right click on the original sound file and select “Get Info”. Go to the options tab and uncheck the start and stop times so that when you play song the whole track is played not just the forty second section you wanted as a ringtone.
