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September 11, 2007 12:00 AM PDT

The easiest free iPhone ringtone method yet

by Ben Wilson
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Rogue Amoeba has released MakeiPhoneRingtone, a free tool that automates this trick for getting AAC tracks into the Ringtones section of iTunes and syncing them to the iPhone freely. You simply launch the application then drag an AAC icon over its main window, and the file will automatically be sent to iTunes as a ringtone, at which point it can be immediately synced to the iPhone. [Note that this tool may be susceptible to changes in future iTunes revisions that could block its functionality]

The company also happens to offer Fission, an audio editing tool priced at $32 that is great for cutting down tracks to create ringtone-worthy snippets. Rogue has posted a tutorial for using Fission to create ringtones.

Other options for putting ringtones on the iPhone included Apple's newly available $.99-per method, which offers built-in editing, and Ambrosia Software's $15 iToner.

Feedback? info@iphoneatlas.com.

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by WhiteDog September 11, 2007 4:31 PM PDT
What if the track you want to use as a ringtone is an MP3 file? Fission won't convert MP3 to AAC - because QuickTime can't. After a bit of floundering around, I came up with the following, free, procedure. First use Audacity, a free audio editing app, to crop the desired selection from your MP3 file. Save it to the desktop as an MP3. Then import it into iTunes. Even if you rename the file on the desktop it will retain the MP3 ID tag info so you may need to change the title in iTunes if you want to easily differentiate it from the original track. Then you can convert the file to AAC using iTunes, under the Advanced menu. Once that is done, you can drag it directly into MakeiPhoneRingtone or, to avoid more duplication, drag the file out of iTunes to the desktop and delete the copy from iTunes. Then drag the file into MakeiPhoneRingtone and it will be placed into the RingTones folder in iTunes. Interestingly, files in the Ringtones folder don't show up in the Music library as all other files seem to do.

The advantage MakeiPhoneRingtone has over iToner, besides being free, is that it doesn't require your iPhone to be connected in order to work. This may not be important to everyone, but since I don't yet own an iPhone but wanted to learn the procedure anyway, I found it a useful distinction.
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by Joannazl February 7, 2009 9:02 AM PST
I found another iPhone Ringtone Maker + Transfer software that can make iPhone ringtone from all popular video and audio files easily, and transfer ringtone to iPhone directly without iTunes. http://www.dvdconverterreview.com/create-free-custom-iphone-ringtone-mp3-to-iphone-ringtone-m4r.html
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