Back in the day, ringtones were a popular way for artists to make money because they had the market to sell them; before smartphones became so prevalent with youth, it was actually quite hard to get any custom content onto feature phones.
However, with iOS (and a bit of know-how) it’s easy to get custom tones onto your phone while saving a couple bucks in the process. As usual, follow these guides at your own risk if you feel you’re ready to take the leap.
Let’s take a look now, shall we?
- Find an MP3 of whatever you want to make a tone out of.
- Download Audacity and open your MP3 inside the program
- Trim your file down to 30 seconds (ringtones) or 5-7 seconds (alert tones)
- Save the file
- Open iTunes
- Drag your MP3 into iTunes, and find it
- Right click on the file and click “Create AAC Version”. This creates a version of the song file we can convert into a ringtone.
- Find the new version in iTunes, and delete the MP3 entries
- Right click it and “Show in Windows Explorer” (or the equivalent on a Mac)
- Rename the file from an .m4a to an .m4r. You may need to enable extension viewing on Windows if you don’t see “filename.m4a”; do so by following this tutorial.
- Open iTunes again
- Drag in the .m4r file. It should show up under “Ringtones” on the left pane.
- Sync with your iPhone, and enjoy!
If you’d rather a video, CNET has a lovely post on it here. Enjoy, and happy texting!
