To start with creating your own iPhone ringtone, open iTunes and select the song that you want to make a ringtone out of.

Right click and select “Get Info“. Go to the “Options” tab select a “Start Time” and “Stop Time” . This will ensure that iTunes will play the song starting from the “Start Time” to the “Stop Time”. Make sure that the stop time doesn’t exceed the start time by more than about 40 seconds. To be on the safer side, I usually keep the length at 30 seconds.

You can uncheck the start and stop time settings after you’ve created your ring tone.

Now, go to Edit->Preferences and in the General tab click on Import settings

And make sure that the AAC encoder settings are set to the following.

Now, right click on the song that you’d selected in the beginning and create an AAC version out of it.

You should now see two songs with the same name in iTunes but one of them would be of 30 seconds duration (or the duration that you chose for the ringtone), while the other one would be the full original song. We’re almost done now.

Select the newly created 30 second AAC version of the song in iTunes and press CTRL+C. Paste the song on your desktop (or any other folder) using the CTRL+V shortcut. This AAC version of the song will have the .M4A extension. Change it to .M4R.

Now, with the iPhone connected to your computer. Simply drag this file to the iPhone icon in iTunes.

That’s it. Your newly created ringtone should now be visible in the iPhone and you can start using it rightaway.

If you have any questions please leave a comment so we can help.