I spent quite some time looking on the Internet for a tutorial on how to put a custom ringtone on my iPhone. But every tutorial I found always needed you to Jail Break your iPhone. I’m not a fan of Jail Breaking your iPhone, for the sole reason that I don’t want to risk my warranty using customised firmware. It just isn’t worth the risk in my eyes.
So I set out to find a way that I could put custom ringtones on the iPhone in an at least semi-legitimate way. After all, it couldn’t be that hard right? The iPhone is a portable music player after all. After a little bit of research and fiddling around with iTunes and the iPhone I worked it out, as suspected it’s not too hard to make it work.
After downloading some pre-made ringtones from websites, I noticed that they are all .MFR. iTunes native format is .M4A, so I decided to see if it was as simple as renaming a .M4A file to .M4R to create a ringtone from it…it was. So all you need to do is take a file you want, convert it to AAC format, rename to .M4R and sync it to your iPhone. Follow the step by step instructions and screenshots below to setup custom ringtones on your iPhone.
Steps:
- Open File in iTunes
- Convert to AAC
- Open in Windows Explorer
- Rename to M4R
- Add M4R to Library
- Check file is in Ringtones
- Ensure Sync Ringtones is Selected and Sync
- Select Ringtone on iPhone
#1 by April on August 12, 2009 - 4:07 am
Ok so after much pissing around this morning, I have found out some very helpful tips for those of you trying to covert MP3′s to ringtones……here are some tips
Max length 30 secs!
If it is longer your iphone won’t be able to even see the ringtone in the itunes sync menu
Short Filenames no numbers eg dreams.m4r
If you dont do this, it will appear to have syncd but you won’t see it in the settings menu
I was about to throw my phone away, so hopefully this will make it easier for someone else!