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As Apple has started charging $2 for a Ringtone, I started googling for sites giving free iPhone ringtones. However, after looking at the results i thought of doing bit work myself on creating ringtones for iPhone using regular MP3 files.
This blog is dedicated for the people, who wants to play cool ringtones every now and then. Lets begin with some theory about iPhone ringtone format.

Bit Theory:

Apple iPhone uses Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio format of Apple’s iPhone, iPod, iTunes and by all iTuned Store audio. AAC (MPEG2-AAC) is an encoding scheme designed to give the highest audio quality in smallest filesize / bitrate.
Wikipedia says

“Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at many bit-rates.”

AAC is also the standard audio format for Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii. Files encoded with AAC can have .m4a,m4b,m4p,.m4v file names while .m4r, .3gp, .mp4, .aac as file extensions. When somebody send such file as an email attachment, it get the audio/aac or audio/aacp as MIME type.

The Trick:

Itunes and iPhones uses .m4r as file extension for all the ringtones. So all we need is a .m4r file imported in the itunes and sync it with the iphone.
Lets take an example of adding custom mp3 file as a ringtone in iPhone.

1. Add the required MP3 file in the iTune library
2. Select the added file and right click on it. Select “Convert Selection to AAC“
3. Above step will create another file with .m4a extension.
4. Locate this file using finder or Windows explorer. ( Right click and choose ‘Show in Explorer‘ )
5. Make a duplicate(copy) of the file and rename it if needed.
6. Change the extension from .m4a to .m4r ( if you are not able to view extension in windows, disable the file extension hiding option from Tools->Folder Options. In case of MAC, right click on the file and choose Get Info and change the extension. )
7. Import the newly created .m4r file and you will automatically see it listed under Ringtones category in iTunes.
8. Connect your iPhone and Sync the Ringtones.

Enjoy your new custom Ringtone!! There are commercial softwares available to directly take mp3 files as input and push them on iPhone as ringtones.

Following is the list of some such softwares.

• iToner ($15 from Ambrosia Software for MAC), which is a full-featured ringtone manager for the iPhone.
• iPhoneRingtoneMaker ($15 from Efiko Software for Windows).
• Switch plus audio file converter