Are you bored of the default Marimba iPhone ringtone? Wish you had that catchy chorus from your favourite song but don’t want to pay for it? Then use this trick on how to make your own iPhone ringtone for free.

What you need:

iTunes (I have used version 9.0.3 OS X but it works on Windows as well)
The song you wish to make a tone from in your iTunes library (For this example I have used B.E.P – Ring a Ling)
an iPhone to transfer the tone to

Steps:

1. Select the song you wish to make a ringtone from your iTunes music library.

Select the song from iTunes Music Library

2. Right click (cmd-click on Macs) the song and click “Get Info”

Right click then click Get Info

3. Click the “Options” tab and check the Start and Stop time checkboxes. Set these to the part of the song you want to be the tone. Make it no more than 30 seconds in duration. Click OK.

Type in the start and stop times for the tone

4. Right click the song again and click “Create AAC version”.

Create an AAC version of the song

4.b. If the “Create AAC version” option is not there, you may need to change the way iTunes imports songs – Go to iTunes Preferences -> Import Settings and change “Import Using” to “AAC Encoder” if this is the case.

Import Settings should be set to AAC encoder

5. You should see two versions of the song in your iTunes library – the song, and beneath it the tone. You can distinguish between them by the “Time” (the ringtone will be much shorter than the song). Right click on the tone and click “Show in Finder” (On Windows this will be Show in Explorer). Keep this window open.

Show the file in Finder or Explorer

6. Now we need to remove the tone version from the iTunes library but keep the file. To do this go back to iTunes, select the tone and press “delete” on the keyboard. iTunes will ask if you want to keep the file or move to trash. Keep the file.

Remove from iTunes but keep the file

7. In Finder (or Explorer) select the .m4a version and rename the file to have the extension .m4r

Select the m4a file in Finder or Explorer

Change the m4a extension to m4r by renaming the file

8. Double click the m4r file and it will be imported into the iTunes as a ringtone.

The tone will be imported into “Ringtones” when double clicked

9. Back in your iTunes Music Library right click the song you just made a ringtone from. Click “Get Info”, then click the “Options” tab, then uncheck the Start and Stop time boxes. Click OK. This step is the opposite to step 3 and will make the real song go back to it’s full duration.

10. Connect your iPhone and make sure Sync Ringtones is checked. Perform a sync and it should send the tone across.

Synchronise Ringtones in iTunes with iPhone plugged in

Done. You should now be able to select the tone in Settings -> Sounds -> Ringtone on your iPhone.

The custom tone should now be on your iPhone

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