Making your own iPhone ringtones in under 10 steps

Story so far: I went and stood in line on the morning of July 12th at 0850. There were some 30 and odd people ahead of me. I was able to get into the store at 1231 and I walked out with my very own 8gb black iPhone at 1252. I love this thing. It’s super nice, but Steve Jobs requires that I purchase ring tones for 99 cents off of iTunes to be able to use them with my phone.

I have several problems with this business model:
1. I own my music, I own my iPhone, and I’m not paying anyone anything to give me a 30 second clip of my music.
2. Especially considering *I* don’t get to choose which 30 seconds of the song I want as my ring tone.
3. See 1 and 2 above.

So here’s how you beat the system.

1. Find the song you want.
2. Right-click song, click Get Info
3. Switch to the Options tab
4. Set a Start Time and Stop Time. This must be no greater than 30 seconds. For the purpose of this example, let’s pretend you want the first 30 seconds of the song. So you’d set the start time to 0:00 and the stop time to 0:30. Click OK to get back to the main window.
5. Right-click the song again and click Convert Selection to AAC.
6. iTunes thinks about it a little and then suddenly you’ll see two copies of your song. The original one, and then one that’s only 30 seconds long. Right click the 30 second AAC version and click Show in Windows Explorer. (I expect what you’ll see here will be different in Mac OS, but I don’t think it changes much, if anything.)
7. In the Windows Explorer window that popped up, rename the file extension to m4r. In my example, I renamed 01 Whole Lotta Love.m4a to 01 Whole Lotta Love.m4r. It’d help if you have told Windows to actually display file extensions like on my machine.
8. Drag and drop your new ringtone to the Ringtones folder under your iTunes library.
9. Depending on your settings, you may need to manually copy this over to your iPhone or iTunes will do it next time your ringtones are synced. Profit.

I think I’ll convert a bunch of Nintendo game music into ringtones now.

Update: I’ve been informed that this is an “old trick” from the iPhone 1.0 days. Huh, okay. Hopefully it’s still useful to someone.