I recently got an iPhone and was very unhappy to discover I couldn’t use one of my own mp3s as a ringtone. I thought this was very strange until I discovered Apple wants you to pay again for the right to make a ringtone. So you pay $.99 for the song on itunes, then they want you to pay another $.99 to make it a ring tone. Ok that doesn’t sound right to me. I have already paid for the song once, why should I have to pay for it again? Well I remembered that if you ripped an audio book, you had to rename the file to get it to be in the audio book category. That got me thinking maybe you could do the same thing with a ringtone. So I did a search and found they had an extension of m4r. I tried renaming an mp3 to that but it did not work. Then i converted an mp3 to aac and renamed it, still did not work. Then I discovered that ringtones are normally around 30 sec long. So I converted 30 sec of an mp3 to aac (made it an m4p for some reason) and then renamed it to m4r. That worked, so now you can make any song you have into a ring tone.

Here is what I did to make my ringtone.

1. In Itunes right click on an mp3 and click “Get info”.



2. Go to the options tab.


3. Put the start and end times for your ring tone.


4. Click ok
5. Now right click on the mp3 and select convert to aac.


6. Right click on the file and click “Show in folder” or “Show in Windows Explorer”.


7. You should now have a 30 sec file with an extension of m4p or m4a. (Mine is only 2 sec because I converted a short file as an example)


8. Change the extension to m4r.


9 Itunes will not be able to find the file because it is named different so delete the one that is in your library

10 Now you will have to add the renamed file back into your library.

11. You will now have the file in a section of itunes called “Ringtones”.

12. Drag the ringtone onto your iPhone.

Congratulations you have just made yourself a ringtone.

A few things to watch out for. I converted “It’s all about the Pentiums” by Weird Al and it would not work well with other ring tones. To solve this problem, just remove the apostrophe in the name of the file and in the id tag of the song.

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