iPhone ringtones don’t have to break the bank!

While I do not want to get into a heated discussion about piracy and everyone’s different beliefs on the matter, I will say that I think that laws should be obeyed, and the artists definitely should get what they earned on their music. HOWEVER, once you have paid for an album, CD, or even just one song… why shouldn’t you be able to do what you want with it!? If I buy a CD, I want to be able to play it on my stereo in the house, in my car, as well as have it ripped to my iTunes so I can listen to it on my computer in the office and on my iPod when I go on a run! I’m not giving it away to anybody else, and after all – I paid for it!

So why, then – should I have to pay Apple $1 extra just to snip my audio file? And what if I want to have a song as a ring tone on my iPhone that isn’t available in the iTunes store? Well, I’m going to show you…

The first thing that you need to do is get Audacity downloading. It’s a free program and it is very easy to use. Visit http://audacity.sourceforge.net to get the download.

While that’s downloading, head over to Windows Explorer (or just open up any folder) and hit the ALT button on your keyboard (if you’re on Vista. If you aren’t on Vista, don’t worry about hitting ALT). You will see the file, edit, view… menus appear below the navigation bar. Choose Folder Options from the Tools menu.

Switch to the View tab in the folder options window and find in the advanced settings list “Hide extensions for known file types.” This should be DE-SELECTED.

By now, Audacity should be downloaded and you can go ahead and install it. We’re getting to the fun part! Open up Audacity and prepare your music file. A properly prepared music file should be: 1) a COPY of the original 2) mp3 format 3) a really good song that won’t embarrass you if it rings in public! You want it to be a copy because you don’t want to accidentally damage the original file. This is a good practice when working with any file on your computer.

Once you open audacity, you can drag-n-drop your music file into the gray area and it will automatically go through the mp3 importing process. You’ll see the file like this:

Go ahead and play the song, and listen for it to get to the starting point you would like the ring tone to start at. When it gets to the right point, just pause it and note the time. Use the time line just above the file to estimate. There will be a certain amount of fine-tuning anyway. You can control where the song plays by using your mouse right on the blue lines. It’s just like a cursor in a line of text.

Once you find your starting point (which should probably be the start of the chorus), you need an ending point (obviously). Your phone generally isn’t going to ring for very long and even if you don’t answer it, voicemail will eventually pick up or the caller will just hang up. [Don't act like you've never ignored the phone ringing just to listen to your ringtone!] I usually either wait for the song to give me a good ending point (the end of the chorus) or if the chorus is too long, I give it about 20-30 seconds and just end it. Like I said you won’t hear anything past that anyway.

In order to trim the song, highlight the peice you want (just like text in a text editor) and click the “Trim Outside Selection” button in the toolbar. I put a red box around it in the next screen shot.

Repeat this process for fine-tuning. If you aren’t particular about making it sound like the song starts on a good beat or ends nicely, then you’re done. Otherwise… experiment away! When you’re done, press Ctrl+a on your keyboard.

In order to be able to save as an Mp3 you need to download a dll file. Click HERE for instructions on obtaining the dll file. Make sure you download the zip option.

Once it’s downloaded, unzip it and store the dll file in a location where it won’t get deleted, like the program files directory, or My Documents if you know you won’t accidentally delete it.

Choose “Export Selection as Mp3 from the file menu and save it right on your desktop. Audacity will prompt you to locate the dll that you downloaded. Simply browse to it, and Audacity will export your file! We’re over halfway there!! At this point, if you play the file that we just exported, you will only hear the short version we trimmed! Now open up iTunes.

Drag the file we just exported into iTunes directly into your library. It will be imported as an Mp3. Right click on the file, and choose “Create AAC Version”. You’ll want to see which one is which, so right click on the “Name” column header in iTunes and click “Kind”. This will add a column to show you the file type of each file. You can now delete the file we dragged into iTunes which is an MPEG audio file (as seen in the Kind column).

Now you’re left with just the AAC audio file of our little creation. Drag it out of iTunes and onto your desktop. Here’s where the importance of doing the step where you disable “hide extensions for known file types” comes in. On your desktop you should see the filename as well as the .m4a extension.

Right click on the file, and choose “rename”. You can leave the actual name alone, but change the extension to “.m4r” from “.m4a”.

Back to iTunes: Click “Ringtones” under library, and drag your new .m4r file there. Configure your iPhone to sync ringtones, and after your next sync it should be listed when you view your settings. On my first time doing this several months ago, I had to play around with my options a bit before it actually showed up on the phone. I ended up having to let iTunes erase all of my synced data, and re-sync, which wasn’t really a problem because it put everything back like it was.

Worst case scenario, if the ringtone just simply won’t sync to your iPhone, go to your iPhone summary in iTunes and check the box “Manually manage music and videos” then you can just drag your ringtone from iTunes into your iPhone with the little iPhone icon in iTunes.

Here’s to show you that it’s in my phone:

Good luck! Feel free to email me or post a comment if you have a question!