Sowing Circle's iPhone Blog

Posted by Jim

How to create custom ringtones using iTunes:

I found a post that indicated how to create custom ringtones from existing audio files that you may have. The post was based upon the Mac version 7 of iTunes. In addition there were hundreds of comments from people for whom the method did not work. So in this post I have adapted the instructions for Windows OS and the Windows version of iTunes version 8.2. In addition, I noted the one work around that I had to apply, to make it work. But I do want to give credit to the original post.

1. Right click on the song you are going to make into a ringer and select “Get Info.” Please make sure that you have rights to utilize the song that you have chosen. For example, as a ringtone for when my wife calls, I have chosen her favorite song that she plays on the piano. It happens to be a public domain song. So no copyright issues there.
2. Select the “Options” tab. Take note of the “Start Time” and “Stop Time” check boxes. Place a checkmark in both boxes and input the time you want your ringtone to start and stop. The ringtone has to be 30 seconds or less. Click OK when you’re done.
   
3. Select the “Info” tab. Make sure that you have values for Name, Artist, Album Artist and Album. This was the workaround that I had to incorporate to get the ringtone to show up for synchronization with the iPhone.
4. Make sure that iTunes is set to encode your songs to the AAC format. Go to iTunes > Edit > Preferences > General. Click the “Import Settings” button (see images below) Change the “Import Using” drop down menu to “AAC Encoder” and a bitrate of 128 kbps or less).
   
5. Right click on your newly “clipped” song and select “Convert Selection to AAC.” The song will be re-encoded using the start and stop times you have set.
6. 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).
7. Go back to the song on your desktop and change the extension from .m4a to .m4r.
8. After the extension is changed, double click on the file to add it to your iTunes library under the ringtones section. Then sync your iPhone with iTunes. The new ringtone should now be available to choose as a custom ringtone.
9. Remember to go back into iTunes and restore your custom start and stop times to the default values for the original version of your song.

If you have any problems with this, let me know so that we can update the procedures.