How to Create iPhone Ringtones using iTunes 8

You can make custom iPhone ring tones from your favorite music tracks using iTunes. By default iTunes lets you create a ring tone from songs only purchased from their store. However with a simple trick you can make iTunes create ring tones for any other songs, such as those mp3 tracks ripped from your Audio CD collection.

An iPhone ringtone should be less than 30 seconds. Play the song in iTunes or any other media player and note down the start and end times, with a duration less than or equal to 30 secs.  After this, follow these steps to create a ringtone of your favorite song:

1. Right click on the interested song in iTunes and select Get Info.
2. Click on the ‘Options’ tab.

3.  Enter the start and end times noted previously.
4. Right-click and choose ‘Create AAC Version’. (Depending on the version of iTunes you may see a slightly different option for AAC conversion)
5. iTunes immediately creates an AAC encoded file and it shows up in the song list. Right click on the song in the list and select ‘Show in Windows Explorer’.
6.  Or you can find the file in the My Music –> iTunes Music folder. The file is stored by iTunes under the same album name as the original music track in the iTunes Music folder.
7. Change the extension of this .m4a file to .m4r. (If you are unable to view file extensions, open the file in Windows Explorer and go to Tools –> Folder Options –> View tab. Uncheck the option ‘Hide extensions for known file types.’ When Windows shows up a warning upon giving the new extension, click ‘Yes’.)

8. You can now transfer your newly created ring tone to your iPhone by opening it in iTunes and syncing through it.
Enjoy!