How to Make Free Ringtones for iPhone Using iTunes

The iPhone is an awesome smartphone and I’ve been in love with it ever since I got it.

The iTunes app store is just one of the many benefits of using the iPhone and it is amazing to see and use all the innovative applications being developed by third party developers.

However, if you talk about Apple as a company, they’ve had a pretty tight control over the iPhone platform and that is my only gripe with it. Apple’s control over the iPhone ecosystem is so much that they charge you to even create ring tones for the iPhone even if you have purchased the song legally through iTunes, and for a lot of people paying for ringtones is the only way to get ringtones for the otherwise excellent phone.

In today’s tutorial we’ll show you how you can create a ringtone for your iPhone for free using nothing but iTunes and a little perseverance.

To start with creating your own iPhone ringtone, open iTunes and select the song that you want to make a ringtone out of.

Right click and select “Get Info“. Go to the “Options” tab select a “Start Time” and “Stop Time” . This will ensure that iTunes will play the song starting from the “Start Time” to the “Stop Time”. Make sure that the stop time doesn’t exceed the start time by more than about 40 seconds. To be on the safer side, I usually keep the length at 30 seconds.

You can uncheck the start and stop time settings after you’ve created your ring tone.

Now, go to Edit->Preferences and in the General tab click on Import settings

And make sure that the AAC encoder settings are set to the following.

Now, right click on the song that you’d selected in the beginning and create an AAC version out of it.

You should now see two songs with the same name in iTunes but one of them would be of 30 seconds duration (or the duration that you chose for the ringtone), while the other one would be the full original song. We’re almost done now.

Select the newly created 30 second AAC version of the song in iTunes and press CTRL+C. Paste the song on your desktop (or any other folder) using the CTRL+V shortcut. This AAC version of the song will have the .M4A extension. Change it to .M4R.

Now, with the iPhone connected to your computer. Simply drag this file to the iPhone icon in iTunes.

That’s it. Your newly created ringtone should now be visible in the iPhone and you can start using it rightaway.

How to Make Free Ringtones for iPhone Using iTunes