Are you bored with the standard iPhone ringtones? Maybe you’d rather hear a song from your favorite band or the theme from your favorite TV show when your phone rings. You can easily convert any song or audio clip in your iTunes Library into a ringtone and I’ll show you how you can annoy the people around you with an iPhone ringtone like the Doctor Who theme or Monty Python’s The Lumberjack Song.
WARNING: You should only follow these procedures if you originally used iTunes to set up your iPhone and you synced your media from iTunes to your phone. It seems that you can’t sync content from your phone to iTunes, so if you have media on your phone that’s not in iTunes, it will most likely get deleted from your phone, even if you have not chosen to sync that content. However, there is an option available for setting any song as your ringtone without using iTunes.
To convert a song or other audio file in your iTunes Library into an iPhone ringtone, open iTunes and select a song in your library. Either right-click on the song, or click the three horizontal dots to the right of the song name, and select Get Info from the popup menu.
NOTE: Any song or audio file you choose as your ringtone must be DRM-free.
On the dialog box that displays, check both the “start” and “stop” boxes and enter the start and stop times for the segment of the song or audio file you want to use. The segment can be no longer than 30 seconds. You may want to listen to the song first to determine which 30 seconds you want to use as your iPhone ringtone. For my example, the Doctor Who TV theme is only about 42 seconds long, so I’m going to use the first 30 seconds of it. I enter “0:00” for the “start” time and “0:30” for the “stop” time. You don’t have to make the clip the full 30 seconds, but you can’t make it any more than that. Click OK when you’re done.
Go to File > Convert > Create AAC Version.
A duplicate song file is created with the same name as the original song, but it’s only 30 seconds long (or less). If you have trouble finding the duplicated song, you can sort the songs by name (click the Name heading). Make sure the new song is selected, right-click it (or click the three horizontal dots to the right of the song name), and select Show in Finder from the popup menu.
iTunes differentiates between songs and ringtones by the file extension. The AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format we created using the .m4a extension and ringtones use the .m4r extension. So, you need to change the extension on the new file you created. In the Finder window that displays, click the .m4a file to select it and then click it again to rename it. Make sure you only change the extension to .m4r. Do not change the rest of the file name. Press Enter when you’re done.
NOTE: If you don’t see the file extensions, you need to change a setting in Finder to show them. In a Finder window, go to Finder > Preferences. On the Preferences dialog box, click Advanced on the toolbar at the top and check the “Show all filename extensions” box.
A dialog box displays to make sure you want to change the extension to .m4r. Click the Use .m4r button.
Once you’ve changed the extension on the shorter song file, you can delete that song from your iTunes library. So, go back into iTunes, select the new, shorter song and press the Delete key. Click the Delete Song button on the confirmation dialog box that displays.
When you delete a song in iTunes, you can either keep the song file or move it to the trash. You still need to add the ringtone to your phone using the .m4r file, so, click the Keep File button to keep the .m4r file you created.
Now, you need to sync your new iPhone ringtone, so, go back to the Finder window and double-click on the .m4r file. The ringtone is automatically added to the Tone library in iTunes.
Connect your iPhone to your computer. In iTunes, click the device button on the toolbar.
Click Tones in the Settings menu on the left, and then check the Sync Tones box. To sync only the ringtone you selected, click the Selected tones option. In my case, I only have one ringtone, so I’ll accept the default option of All tones. If you have more iPhone ringtones you want to sync, but you don’t want to sync all of them, select the Selected tones option and then select the ringtones you want to sync.
If you’re syncing your iPhone with iTunes for the first time, you will get a dialog box asking if you’re sure you want to remove media from your phone and replace it with media from your iTunes library. You shouldn’t get it if you’ve been using iTunes to sync your iPhone.
WARNING: As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, if you did not originally use iTunes to sync your media to your iPhone, you should stop here. If you choose to remove and sync, you could lose all your media from your iPhone. When I synced my ringtone, all the music on my phone was removed because I had not used iTunes to sync it to my phone originally. So, if you’re at all unsure about this, click the Cancel button and see our procedure about setting any song as your ringtone without using iTunes.
If you’re sure you want to continue, click the Remove and Sync button.
To begin syncing the iPhone ringtone, click the Apply button in the lower-right corner of the window.
Now that the ringtone has been added to your phone, you need to select it as the ringtone you want to use. To do this, tap Settings on the Home screen on your iPhone.
On the Settings screen, tap Sounds & Haptics.
Then, tap Ringtone on the Sounds & Haptics screen.
The custom iPhone ringtone you added should be at the top of the list of ringtones, above the ones that come with the phone. Tap on the custom ringtone to select it.
Your custom ringtone will have a blue check mark in front of it.
You can also use custom iPhone ringtones when setting ringtones and text tones for different contacts on your phone.
