Creating your own iPhone ringtone for free

It is free to create ringtone for iPhone from an existing music that you already own. This is how it is done on the latest iTune version 9.2.1.5 as of August 2010.

Select an existing music from the iTune Music library to be converted into an iPhone ringtone. Playback the music and determine the start and stop time of the ringtone clip. Most ringtone has a period of about 30 seconds.

Right click on the music and choose “Get Info” from the menu, then select the “Options” tab. Within the option tab, check the "Start Time" and "Stop Time" option. Enter the desired time frame to create the music clip. Now, the original contents of the music is playback as if it is being clipped or shorten to the selected period. In reality, the music/content remains intact. In fact, iTune will now only play the particular selection between the start and stop time. Now, right-click the music again and select “Create AAC version”. At time point of time, a shorter AAC version of the original music will be created. The new music clip will be visible as a new item created in the music library but grayed out during the conversion process. Once the AAC conversion is completed, the music clip will appear in solid color. It is recommended to return to the option tab and deselect the start and stop time of original song. Otherwise, the song will always playback in the clipped mode.

Now, the ringtone is created but not yet moved into iTune. In order to import it to iTune, select the AAC version of the song and right-click "Show in Windows Explorer". iTune will open the music folder and highlight the selected music clip. The converted AAC file will have a .m4a file extension. In order to get iTune recognizing it as a ringtone file, just rename (F2) it to a .m4r extension. Windows will prompt a warning about filename change but it can be safely ignored. Once, the file is being renamed, drag the ringtone file back into iTune Library again. This will force iTune to re-import the .m4r file as a ringtone. The music clip will now be added into the Ringtones folder. At this moment, iTune will not be able to find that AAC file since it has been rename and moved to another location. The AAC file in iTune library will shows an exclamation mark and it advisable to delete that away.

In the final step, sync up the iPhone to get the ringtone from iTune. In order to activate the sync process, locate the Ringtones tab within the iPhone device and select sync the ringtones. Within seconds, the ringtones should copy into the iPhone. The new ringtones can be found in iphone "Settings", "Sounds", Ringtone.

Have lotsa of fun!!