Tuesday November 17
 
10:11
 
Create iPhone 3G ringtones for free

I searched the AppStore for ages to download free ringtone apps. Without exception they were all crap – low quality audio rips like “ha ha ha ha ha ha” or “fart” or “Boobies!” Actually, I made the last one up. That would have been quite cool.

As well as being crap, they also continually spammed me.

What I wanted was a way to create ringtones from MP3 songs in my iTunes – from the likes of Coldplay, Keane, Oasis, etc etc – and in the end it was much simpler than I anticipated. All it needs is iTunes.

To make iPhone ringtones from iTunes:

1. Check your settings to make sure iTunes is set to rip CDs in AAC format. I used “iTunes Plus” so the ringtone would sound of sufficiently high quality. Preferences -> Advanced -> Importing -> AAC Encoder.

2. Find a 30 second chunk of a song you like and note the start and end times in seconds. Ringtones can be maximum 30 seconds. The iPhone wont recognise and ringtone longer than the max 30 secs.

3. Right click on the song and select Options, then change the Start Time and Stop Time boxes to the times you noticed.

4. Click OK and then double click the song to play it. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until it sounds perfik.

5. Right click on the song and select Convert Selection to AAC.

6. Once done, you’ll have a duplicate of the song. Check it is 30 seconds or less. Then right click on the song and choose Show in Explorer (or find it yourself in your iTunes folder).

7. Copy the file to your desktop and rename the .m4a extension to .m4r

8. Right click on the song in iTunes and delete it from iTunes. The .m4r file will remain on your desktop.

9. Double click the .m4r file to add it to iTunes

10. Go back to the original song and reset the Start and Stop times (just uncheck the boxes)

11. Plug in your iPhone and sync (make sure your iPhone 3G or 3GS preferences are set to sync ringtones!)

No longer will you have to download free – or worse, pay for – crap ringtones. No longer will you be paying 99p or 99c or whatever it is for a Black Eyed Peas, Britney Spears, Westlife, or Robbie Williams. Now you can annot those around you with Take That, ABBA, James Bond, or even The Birdie Song.

Ringtones also work as the sounds for alarms – so creating a ringtone also creates a free alarm tone. There’s no way that I know of to create a sound or tone for new messages or new mails or alerts though.