One of the common frustrations that iOS users have is the difficulty of creating and using custom ringtones on your iPhone. iOS provides a large collection of default ringtones, but many of us prefer to use a custom ringtone. Perhaps you’d like to set your favorite song as the ringtone or there’s a funny audio clip which you want to use for your Messages tone.

Fortunately, it is possible to use custom ringtones on your iPhone or iPad. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to create custom ringtones using iTunes and transfer it to your iPhone in iOS 12 or lower. If you wish to download a ringtone, there are many sites out there, such as RingtonesHub which offers .m4r ringtones as well so you don’t have to do the extra work of converting it.

How to Create Custom Ringtone From Any Song or Music Track For Free

Step 1: Connect your iPhone to your computer and open iTunes.

Step 2: Click on Songs in the sidebar. This opens your music library with a list of all the songs that have been synced to your iPhone.

Step 3: Find the song which you’d like to set as your iPhone ringtone, right-click on it and choose Song Info.

Step 4: From the dialog box that opens, go to the Options tab and tick the ‘start’ and ‘stop’ boxes. Enter the start and stop times for the segment of the song or audio file that you want to use. Once done, click the OK button.

Step 5: From your music library, select the song, then go to File > Convert > Create AAC Version. A duplicate song file is created with the same name as the original.

• Note: If you’re having trouble determining which song has the AAC file format, then you can right-click on a song and choose Song Info. Go to the File tab and you should see the song’s format next to the kind label.

Step 6: Now that you’ve created your custom song and converted it to AAC version, you have to append it with .m4r extension so that it can be used as a ringtone. To do so, select the song with AAC format in your music library, then right-click on it and choose Show in Finder.

Step 7: Finder opens the iTunes folder that has the song you created. It will have the .m4a extension. Rename the song file so that it has the .m4r extension. For instance, if the files name is Hello.m4a, you have to rename it to Hello.m4r.

Step 8: Now go back to iTunes and click on your device icon in the top left corner.

Step 9: Click on Tones.

Step 10: Drag and drop the .m4r song file from the iTunes folder to the Tones pane in iTunes.

• If you don’t see the Tones section, then drag and drop the ringtone onto the On My Device section in the sidebar. A new Tones section will appear in the sidebar showing the ringtones on your iPhone.

Step 11: Once the ringtone appears in iTunes, it will also be transferred to the connected iPhone.

How to Set a Custom Ringtone on iPhone

Now that your custom ringtone has been transferred to your iPhone, you are ready to use it. Here’s how:

Step 1: Open the Settings app on your iPhone.

Step 2: Tap on Sounds.

Step 3: Under Sounds and Vibration Patterns section, tap on the type of alert for which you want to set a custom ringtone.

Step 4: A list is displayed with all the available ringtones to choose from. At the top of the list, you should see the custom ringtone that you transferred earlier from iTunes. Tap to select this ringtone as the default. Now whenever you receive an alert of this type, the selected ringtone will be played.

This is the entire process of creating and using custom ringtones on your iPhone. It might seem like a daunting task at first, but once you get the hang of it, it should become easy to use custom ringtones. Apart from this, there are many audio converter tools out there that will allow you to easily convert any song or audio file to .m4r format so that you can transfer it to your iPhone.

If you face any issues, let us know in the comments below.