Saturday, February 19, 2011

Ringtones in iTunes

My new iPhone 4 came and I was looking to reset things up this morning. One of the things that I noticed right away was that my ringtones had changed, so I got back to my default of “Low” by Flo Rida. However I wanted a touch more variety, so I quickly made a few more.

In iTunes, it’s easy to take any song and make a ringtone. Or any mp3 sound, for that matter. Here are the quick steps:

  1. Right click the song in iTunes, and select “Get Info”
  2. Go to the “Options” tab and then set the start and end times for your tone (< 40sec)
  3. Click OK
  4. Right click the song and select “Create AAC Version”. This should dupe your song.
  5. Go back and fix the first song, resetting the start and end times. I just uncheck the boxes.
  6. Select the new song and click “Delete” to remove the new song from iTunes. Select “Keep Files” and not “Recycle Bin” when it asks.
  7. Go to the file in Explorer (Music/iTunes/iTunesMedia/Music) and find your song. If you don’t show extensions in Explorer, fix that. Rename the song to whatever name you have with a .m4r extension instead of .m4a.
  8. Double click the new .m4r and it should open in iTunes (and move to the Ringtones folder if you have that configured)
  9. Do this one song at a time so you don’t forget what you’ve moved around.

That’s it, and you’ll have ringtones the next time you sync.

For me, I made tones for “Crazy Train” by Ozzy (heard that one someone else’s phone), Telephone by Lady Gaga, The Real Slim Shady by Eminem (For Delaney), OMG from Usher (Tia), and Remember the Name from Fort Minor.

1 comment:

K. Brian Kelley said...

For me, it's Scotland the Brave. We stepped off to that for every pass and review of every military parade we did at The Citadel. And it's distinctive.