Customizing Your Own iPhone Ringtones for Free!

Making your own custom ringtones right inside iTunes! It’s so easy you will be wondering why there are people paying money for this to be done. (Sorry if the screen captures appear small, simply hold down the Ctrl key and the '+' key to enlarge the page)

Step 1

Start iTunes. Choose the song which you want to make into your custom ringtone. For this illustration, let’s select 'Rise' by 'Samantha James'. However, it is better to select the song from the main music library instead of selecting it from a playlist.

Step 2

Choose a section of this song to be used as the ringtone you want to hear. This section must be 30 seconds or less. I am going ahead to start the ringtone from 1:03 and end at 1:31. Once you have decided upon the starting and ending points of your selected song, right click on the song, and click on “Get Info”. Go to the “Options” tab as shown in the picture and input the “Start Time” and “Stop Time”.

Once you have entered the times, click on the OK button on the bottom right of the dialogue.

Step 3

This step is easy peasy. Now play the song to test if this is what you want to hear as your custom ringtone. Make the necessary changes if you are not satisfied. Remember, the ringtone cannot be more than 30 seconds.

Step 4

Now that you are satisfied with the 30 second (or less) portion of your selected song to be heard as your custom ringtone, right click on the song and select “Create Apple Lossless Version”. On some older versions of iTunes, this might be “Create AAC Version”.

You will notice a new copy of the song appears directly below this (If you chose the song from LIBRARY). If you chose the song from a playlist like I did here, I will have to search for the song using the search query on the top right of iTunes. I can see that the section is 28 seconds long.

Step 5

Now right click on this new track and select “Show in Explorer”.

Inside the Explorer window, change the extension of the file from ‘.m4a’ to ‘.m4r’.

Cut and paste this file to the windows desktop.

Go back to iTunes LIBRARY (not the playlist) and delete the new song from the library, you do not need it anymore.

Step 6

Go back to your desktop. Double-click on the song and it will automatically play on your iTunes ….. but where is it? It now appears in the “Ringtones” tab! Congrats. Now wasn’t that easy, and free?

Step 7

Next time you sync your iPhone, make sure you select to sync “Ringtones”. When you want to select this tune within your iPhone, it can be found via this path > SETTINGS > SOUNDS > RINGTONE > CUSTOM.