This was one of the big drawbacks. Paying another 99c for making a ringtone from already purchased music? This is a very mean practice by apple, and they should stop doing that because people don’t like to be charged for EVERYTHING, and for some things twice.
Ok, let’s say we want to make a ringtone. What we need here is iTunes (but I guess you already have it) and your iPhone doesn’t have to be jailbroken. It can be fresh out of the box. The idea is to make a little cheat so the iPhone / iTunes will THINK a file you provide is a ringtone. And since most technology is at it’s root stupid here’s how we do it :
1. Find a song you like in iTunes. Right click on it and go to “Get Info”.
2. Go to options tab and find a place where it says “start time” and “stop time”. Remember that your ringtone has to be 30 seconds or less. Play the song a couple of times looking at the seconds to find a perfect spot, here let’s say 0:08 to 0:28 which will make a 20 second ringtone out of it. Click ok.
3. Now make sure you’ve got your encoder set to AAC. If you don’t know what I’m talking about just follow these simple steps to do so:
– Go to iTunes preferences. Then to “Import Settings” and choose AAC as the encoder. Click Ok everywhere.
After you’re done with that select your song and either right click and select convert to MP3, or in new iTunes click the advanced tab on top of the screen and click “create AAC version” there.
Now take that newly created 20 second long song and drag it onto your desktop. Then delete the 20 second file from iTunes completely (important!). You might also want to go to the original file and reset those start and stop times. After the 20 second AAC file is delted from iTunes and exists only on your desktop you see it has a m4a extension. In MAC OS simply select it, press Command + I and change the extension from M4A to M4R. It will ask you if you’re sure to change to m4r. Say you are. In windows you can probably change the extension by either selecting Rename from the right click menu or some preferences of the file.
After this step you have a M4R file on your desktop and it should be associated with iTunes. Click on it twice to open it and it should simply open in iTunes and start playing. But you’ll notice that in the ringtones tab you now have that file. So sync your iPhone and you’re done.