I just got an iPhone and switched to AT&T after five years on Verizon Wireless. Don’t get me wrong - I really liked Verizon. It’s just that I left my previous employer several months ago, and I knew that resigning a contract meant they’d validate my employment status, realize I was no longer employed there, and cancel my 20% discount.
Fortunately, I discovered that Purdue has a deal with AT&T, so I was able to get 20% off both the voice and data portions of my wireless plan. I knew I wanted a smartphone, and after playing around with the options, there was no denying that the iPhone beat the competition in usability, speed, and general awesomeness.
After I bought my 60GB iPod Photo in 2004, I swore up and down that it was the last Apple product I would buy new - yet here I am, with a shiny new iPhone. So sue me…things change.
Anyhow, I’m big on hacking and tweaking my stuff. My last Verizon phone was a Motorola V325, and I hacked the hell out of it to make it work how I wanted. Naturally, I jailbroke my iPhone within 24 hours of my purchase, so that I could better customize stuff like sounds and the UI.
I’ve been using one of the themes from Super Mario World for the past five years on each of my phones, so I knew I wanted to upload it to my iPhone. Turns out that adding ringtones takes a little work, but it can be done - for free, and with free software. iTunes will only let you create ringtones from songs you’ve downloaded from the iTunes Store. I’m going to show you how to create ringtones from any audio file, whether it’s WAV, MP3, AAC, or anything else.
First off, you need Audacity. This is a free, open-source sound editor that’s been around for awhile. You want to make sure to get the latest beta version, as it includes support for exporting to AAC (.m4a) format. Once you have Audacity, you also need to get the ffmpeg libraries, which will support exporting to multiple formats (including AAC). If this link is dead, try the version here.
You’ll notice that the file format of the downloaded libraries is a little odd (the second link will take you to a .7z version) - if you don’t already have it, 7-Zip will allow you to extract the files. Once you have the files extracted, copy them into the Plugins directory of your Audacity program folder - it should be something like C:\Program Files\Audacity 1.3 Beta (Unicode)\Plug-Ins.
If you want to make MP3 ringtones for phones other than the iPhone, you need the LAME libraries, available here.
Now you can load up Audacity (it’s in your Start Menu once you’ve installed it). The first thing you need to do is tell it where the ffmpeg libraries reside. Click the Edit menu, and select Preferences. Go down to Import/Export, where you’ll see a box about ffmpeg in the top left corner:
Click Find Library, and browse to the Plugins folder where you extracted the files. You’ll see that a single dll appears - click it, and click Open. You’ll now see something like this:
Now that Audacity is set up for exporting to AAC, we can start making our ringtones. It’s pretty screenshot-heavy, so click the jump to see the rest.