iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Custom Ringtones

Your iPhone comes with 25 creative and intriguing ringing sounds, from an old car horn to a peppy marimba lick. But where's the fun in that? Surely you don't want to walk around listening to the same ringtones as the millions of other iPhone owners.

Fortunately, the iPhone offers the delightful prospect of making up custom ring sounds, either to use as your main iPhone ring or to assign to individual callers in your Contacts list. This chapter covers the two primary ways of going about it: carving 30-second ringtone snippets out of pop songs, or recording your own in GarageBand.

iTunes Ringtones

In September 2007, Apple announced that it would begin selling custom ringtones from its iTunes Store. Using simple audio tools in the latest version of the iTunes program, you can buy a song for $1, choose a 30-second chunk, pay $1 more for the ringtone, and sync the result to your iPhone.

(Now, if paying a second dollar to use 30 seconds of a song you already own strikes you as a bit of a rip-off, you're not alone. But look at the bright side: that's a lot cheaper than most ringtones. Pop-song ringtones from T-Mobile and Sprint cost $2.50 apiece; from Verizon, they're $3. You don't get to customize them, choose the start and end points, adjust the looping and so on. Worse, incredibly, after 90 days, every Sprint ringtone dies, and you have to pay another $2.50 if you want to keep it. Verizon's last only a year.)

Unfortunately, not all iTunes songs can become ringtones—only ...