Make Ringtones for an iPhone in iTunes for Windows

Apple wants to sell your ringtones for your iPhone from the Apple Store for two dollars. Figure that's a buck for the song, and another buck to convert it to a ringtone.

An open secret is that any Windows PC with a stereo mix feature and with iTunes installed, and the freeware Audacity sound-wave editor can make completely free ringtones that you can import into iTunes. From that point, it's not overly involved to convert them to AAC (.mp4) and then into ringtones.

Follow along, and we'll show you how.

But first, a caveat. If you have a Vista notebook, stereo mix may have been disabled by the manufacturer. To check, right-click the speaker icon in the system tray and select "Recording Devices." In the Sound dialog, right-click in the list area and select "Show disabled devices."

Is “Stereo Mix” in the list? Does the label beside it say “Working?” If not, right-click it and select “Enable.” If you don’t see Stereo Mix there at all, your laptop is not set up for recording multiple sources, and this procedure will not work for you.

Update: If you have a laptop with disabled stereo mix, please see the link at the end of this article for a method that can be used to restore a stereo mix or "what u hear" function on a laptop that has it disabled in firmware.

To start creating your own ringtone, download Audacity from the sourceforge website.

It’s about a 4 MB download. Save it to a folder you’ll remember, and when it arrives, double-click the file to run the installer.

Add MP3 Support . . . If Needed.

When you grabbed Audacity, did you get the stable version or the beta version? If you got the beta version, you can skip this section.

If you got the stable version, you need to add more software in order to support creating MP3 files in Audacity. Fortunately, the free LAME encoder does the job just fine.

The LAME encoder is distributed as a zip file. Save it to a folder you’ll remember. When it arrives, right-click it and select “Extract All” to unzip it.

The single "lame_enc.dll" file should be copied to your C:/Program Files/Audacity folder.

Now we’re ready to try recording a snippet to create a ringtone. The idea here is that Audacity will record whatever we choose to listen to.

There’s only one more thing to check. Start Audacity and select Edit, then Preferences. On the “Audio/IO” tab, see what device is showing under the “Recording” block on the right. It should be set to "Stereo Mix" and two channel (stereo).

With Audacity already started, start up iTunes or any other music player on your PC and locate the song you want to play.

Audacity will let you edit the waveform to get exactly the section of music that you want to include in your ringtone. The iPhone will accept up to 3 MB, but only a fraction of that will be used for a thirty-second ringtone.

You may want to listen to the song all the way through first to decide which part you want to snip. Then play it again, and when that segment approaches, click the red Record button in Audacity. Continue recording until slightly past the section you want to use. In iTunes you can use the time display to roughly mark the start and end of the part you want.

After recording your snippet, stop your music player and click the green Play button in Audacity to review your recording. In my case, I was happy with the starting position, but there were about two or three seconds at the end that I didn’t need.

To delete an unwanted section, click the time-line and drag the “hand” cursor to the position that you want to stop at. This was easy for me because it was at the end of the snippet. All I had to do was high-light the last few seconds and press Delete on my keyboard.

Note at this point you need to click near the beginning of the timeline in order to play the recording again.

As a precaution, it’s a good idea to save your first effort at capturing a snippet as an Audacity project. This is easy. Select File and then Save Project As . . . This is handy because we may want to come back and reopen the original file in case we have problems.

To save the ringtone as an MP3, select File, then Export . . . Save file type as MP3, and select your name for the ringtone.

Now we need to import the ringtone into iTunes. iTunes has no problems with playing MP3s, but we want to convert it to AAC format first.

In iTunes, go to your music library and select File, then Add File to Library. Navigate to where you saved the MP3 ringtone, select it, and choose "Open."

Then find the MP3 in your collection, probably by sorting by song title, click it once to select it, and then right-click it and choose "Create AAC Version" iTunes will do this quickly and reward you with a fancy little chime when it's done.

Next: Importing the Ringtone into Itunes, Troubleshooting, and Conclusion