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I ordered the new iPhone 3GS shortly after its announcement earlier this month, as I’ve wanted one for some time. I was mainly waiting for a 32GB version, which provides enough room for a reasonable (Your definition of reasonable may vary.) number of songs and videos. After anxiously awaiting its delivery, a slight mishap on delivery day, and eventual successful delivery, I excitedly unwrapped my new toy, activated it, and started transferring my media library.

Eventually I started looking for a new ringtone. The included choices are decent, including a good “old fashioned” ringer, but I wanted something more flashy—and I certainly was not going to pay $0.99 for something that would only play for up to forty seconds at a time. Luckily, iPhones ringtones are just short AAC clips, and are therefore easily created from the songs already in your music library. This article will share how to do it yourself.

Note: These instructions are written for the Mac. Adjust accordingly if you use Windows.

The first step is to make sure that iTunes’ Import Settings are set to generate AAC files. In iTunes, select Preferences from the Settings menu, or type ⌘,. On the General tab, select “Import Settings.” The following dialog will appear:

Make sure the “Import Using” setting is on “AAC Encoder” and click OK. Don’t forget to note the existing settings if you want to change back later!

Next, select the song you’d like to use as a ringtone, and get its info by pressing ⌘I. On the Options tab, set the Start Time and Stop Time fields to a section of no more than forty seconds. (Longer clips will not be synced to the iPhone.) Click OK.

Display the song’s context menu by right-clicking, and select “Create AAC Version.” (Alternatively, while the song is selected, select “Create AAC Version” from the Advanced menu.) (Note that this step is still useful even if the song is already an AAC file. In that case, while it won’t actually be converted to a different format, iTunes will cut down to the duration specified above, which will allow it to work as a ringtone.)

iTunes will convert the song to AAC, and shorten it to include only the section specified earlier. (Note in the screenshot below the two versions of “Us And Them,” one of which is only 0:40 in duration.) Once the new clip is created, you can go back to the song’s options and remove the Start Time and Stop Time values, so that the entire song will play.

From the newly created clip’s context menu, select “Show in Finder.” (Alternatively, while the clip is selected, press ⌘R or select “Show in Finder” from the File menu.)

Finder will open with the new clip selected. Return briefly to iTunes, and delete the new clip. In the resulting confirmation dialog, select “Keep File.” This allows us to rename the file in Finder and reimport it to iTunes.

In the Finder window we opened earlier, change the extension of the clip from .m4a to .m4r.

Finder will complain about the change of extension; tell it to “Keep .m4a”.

Drag the clip back into iTunes. It will appear in the Ringtones section of your Library.

Connect your iPhone to your Mac. In the device options, select the Ringtones tab, and make sure the “Sync ringtones” option is selected. Whether or not all ringtones should be synced is up to you, but if “Selected ringtones:” is selected, only the checked ringtones will be available on the iPhone.

Manually sync by clicking the “Sync” button. iTunes will copy your new ringtone to the iPhone.

On the iPhone, open the Settings app. Select the Sounds option on the first screen.

Select “Ringtone”. The newly created and synced ringtone should appear in the Custom section, where it can be previewed and selected for use.

Enjoy!

Also, you might be interested to know that GarageBand 4 creations can be sent to iTunes as ringtones. Put together a clip of no more than forty seconds, and select “Send Ringtone to iTunes” from the Share menu. I use this to add fades to the start and end of the ringtones I’ve created from songs in my library, in the same vein as Apple’s (paid) ringtone creation tools that are built into iTunes. Since GarageBand will accept songs from your iTunes library, this is pretty easy as well—but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader.