How to make a ringtone in iTunes

The out of the box ringtones on an iphone are pretty unimaginative. This is an easy problem to solve however as iTunes has a feature that makes it easy to turn a segment of a song into a ringtone.

(1) Go into iTunes, navigate to the music library, and pick the song you want to use as the ringtone.

(2) Right click on the song and choose Get Info.

(3) In the window that opens up click on the Options tab.

(4) Define the beginning and end positions of the music sample you want to turn into a ring tone by entering the Start Time and Stop Time positions as shown below. Click OK to close the window.

(5) Now right click on the song again, this time choose Create AAC version. A second copy of the song will appear in your iTunes music library, this one only containing the sample you selected when you supplied the start and end times.

Create AAC version of song

(6) Open up a Windows Explorer window and navigate to the file system location of your iTunes music library. It will be located somewhere like C:\Users\[your windows user name]\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music

(7) Change the file extension of the copy you just created from .m4a to .m4r.

(8) Go back into iTunes and choose the File menu, Add File To Library item.

(9) Browse to the location of your iTunes music library where you changed the file extension earlier, and select the file with the .m4r extension you just renamed. Then click Open.

(10) The ringtone will have been added to the Ringtones library in your iTunes.

(11) Now for a bit of housekeeping. Go back into your iTunes music library folder again and delete the entry for the copy of the song you made earlier, as it no longer points to anything since you changed the file extension to be a ringtone.

(12) Sync the iphone with iTunes to copy the ringtone across to the phone.

(13) On the iphone go into Settings, Sounds, Ringtoneand browse for your newly created customised ringtone.

That’s all there is to it. The hardest part is choosing the right song to sample.