Techy: Create an iPhone Ringtone from your own MP3

As you may be aware, I’ve given in to the “white side” and just switched from a Nokia 6230i to a brand new Apple iPhone 8Gb Black from o2 (whilst being disappointed that I wasn’t able to get a discount after being with them 17months on current contract and over 6 years in total). Anyway, one of the first things I wanted to do was copy over my ringtone, but Kool Katy said she didn’t think it was possible to make your own ring-tone on the iPhone without paying via iTunes…

I then found this guide to creating free iPhone ringtones with iTunes 8 which states:

1. Right click on the song you are going to make into a ringtone and select “Get Info.”
2. Go to the “Options” tab and go down to the “Start Time” and “Stop Time” check boxes. Check both boxes and input the time you want your ringtone to start/stop. The ringtone has to be 30 seconds or less. Click “OK” when you’re done.
3. Right click on your newly “clipped” song and select “Create AAC Version”. Or directly click the “Advanced” tab on the main menu of iTunes 8 and select “Create AAC Version” from the drop-down list. The song will be re-encoded using the start and stop times specified.
   Note: If your menu item does not read “Create AAC Version” and reads “Create MP3 Version” or some other format, please go to ”iTunes -> Edit -> Preferences -> General”, click “Import settings” and change “Import using” to “AAC Encoder”
4. After the song is done encoding, navigate to your iTunes Music folder, locate your song, and drag it to your desktop. After the song is on your desktop go back to iTunes and delete the clipped version from you iTunes library (It won’t delete it from your desktop, it will only remove it from iTunes).
5. Go back the song on your desktop and right click on your song and choose “Properties”. Go to the name and extension section and change the extension from .m4a to .m4r (or you can just change the extension right from your desktop).
6. After the extension is changed simply double click on the file to add it to your iTunes library under the ringtones section. Sync your phone with iTunes and you’re done!

Basically – iPhone ringtones need to be 30 seconds or less, less than 3Mb in size (which should be easy with a 30 second limit) and have an .m4r filetype.