How to Make Custom iPhone Ringtones Using iTunes 12 for Free

Unlike Android phones, you can’t just have any saved music file on your phones set as a ringtone for your iPhone. Creating custom ringtones for iPhone is not as simple as that on Android phones. In this short little post, that’s what we’re going to do: create custom ringtones in iTunes and sync created custom ringtones to your iPhone.

Step 1). Open iTunes and find that song that you want to make a ringtone out of. For safety, duplicate this and have it so if something goes wrong, you don’t end up losing that song.

Step 2). Now, right-click and select ‘Get Info’

Step 3). Select the Options tab and you have ‘Start’ and ‘Stop’ check boxes.

Step 4). Check them and enter the desired start and stop time for the ringtone. Make sure it doesn’t exceed 30 seconds.

Step 5). Click OK to apply the settings.

Step 6). Head back to iTunes library and right-click on the song you just edited.

Step 7). Select ‘Create AAC version’

Step 8). Now you got an .m4a version of the song. It’s time to rename the extension.

Step 9). Go to the folder where the .m4a version of the file is. (Select the file, click ‘File’ menu and select ‘Show in Finder’ (for Mac) or ‘Show in Explorer’ (Windows)

Step 10). Rename the extension to “.m4r”.
(Note: if you don’t see the .m4a extension along with the file, you should make sure it’s visible and then change the extension. Otherwise, you’d just be changing the name of the file and not its extension. (In Windows, open file folder, click "View > Show Extensions".)

Step 11). After you’ve renamed the extension to .m4r, head back to iTunes and check the “Tones” section. Your new ringtone should be out there. (if not, drag-drop)

Sync your iPhone with “Sync Tones” enabled and your new ringtone should be up on your iPhone too.

If you think it's too complicated by using iTunes to create iPhone ringtones, you may try using a 3rd-party iPhone ringtone maker program - iPhone Ringtone Maker for Mac to freely create iPhone ringtones from any song quickly and easily.