Remember when you’d pay $1.99 a month to be able to download 3 ringtones a month. Yeah, those days are long behind us. Even before the smartphones ran wild, you could put your own ringtones on your phone. So assuming you own some music this can be achieved even easier with the new phones of today. I’m going to give you a step-by-step guide on creating your own ringtones easily in iTunes. Even if you aren’t a fan of Apple products, or you don’t use iTunes; I think this may be the easiest method I’ve come across.

 

Steps:

1. Identify the song you want to use, and narrow down the section of song you want for your ringtone. I try and keep my ringtones between 30 and 35 seconds. For this example I’ll use Skrillex’s song “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites”

2. I like the entire song, but I want to start the ringtone after the “YES! Oh My God”, right when the bass drop kicks in. To do so, I click on the song in iTunes to select it then right-click on the track and select Get info

3. From the Get Info menu, choose the Options tab. Next check the Start Time and enter where you want the song to start. If it’s right at the beginning set the start time to 0:00. In my case the part I want starts at 0:41, so I entered that in the start time. Now check the Stop Time box and enter a time roughly 30 to 35 seconds after your start time. I entered 1:11 (1 minute and 11 seconds into the song), which is about 30 seconds from my start point. After you specify your Start and Stop times, click OK to close the Get Info window.

4. Now right-click on the song you are working with and choose Create AAC Version. The conversion will take a couple seconds and then you should get a completion chime.

5. Now you should have a duplicate of the original song. If you look closely to the length of the songs you’ll notice the AAC version should only be as long as you specified in the Start and Stop times. So in my case it’s 30 seconds

6. The AAC version saves as an .m4a file. This is where things differ depending on if you have an iPhone or Android phone. If you have an Android phone, you can leave the file “as is” in the .m4a format. If you have an iPhone you’ll want to switch the extension to .m4r (default iPhone ringtones format). Either way we have to get to this file to either transfer it to the Android phone or change the extension for the iPhone. To do this, right-click on your AAC version (your ringtone) and select Show in Windows Explorer.

7. This opens up the exact location of the AAC file we created in Step 4. If you have an android phone you’ll want to connect it with a USB cable compatible with your phone. After you connect the phone, use it as a Mass Storage Device, you’ll get prompted by your phone to do so. Now you’ll want to copy the file and put it in X:\media\ringtones where X is whatever drive letter your phone is. Once you have it in that folder you’re all set and you can select it as a ringtone from your device.  If you have an iPhone proceed to Step 8

8. As I said, when an AAC version of song is created the extension is m4a. So let’s change that real quick. If your files don’t have the extension listed like the above image you’ll have to choose to show the extension. This can be accomplished by going up to the Tools menu and selecting Folder Options. If you don’t see the menu to click on Tools (common in Vista and Windows 7), press your Alt button to reveal the menu bar.

9. In the Folder Options menu, click the View tab. Scroll down and uncheck the “Hide extensions of known file types” box. Click OK when you’re done.

10. You should now see the extensions for your music files. Find your m4a ringtone file, right-click on it, and choose Rename.

11. Now simply change the m4a extension to an m4r extension. If you get a warning about changing the extension, just click OK or Yes. You should now have an m4r file.

12. All you need to do now is double-click the m4r file and it automatically gets added and starts playing in iTunes. Once you have your iPhone connected to your computer you can just drag the file in iTunes to your iPhone.

13. That’s it! You probably want to back to the original file you selected in Step 1, right-click on it, and choose Get Info again. Go back to the Options tab and uncheck the Start Time and Stop Time. Otherwise your original song will only play from that start time to the stop time AKA only about 30 seconds.

Here is the final product:

Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites (Ringtone)