I’m not a “phone guy” and can’t buy an iPhone here in Australia, so I’ve let all the developments and hoo-hah regarding ringtones wash over me. I did notice an interesting item in Lostify that I’ve just had a chance to try out.
It’s probably been covered before and may not work with the 1.1.1 update, but I thought I’d mention a technique for creating ringtones that I’ve discovered. I should note that it’s a Mac-only solution.
As you can see above, I have a number of ringtones that didn’t come from the iTunes Store. I’ve never been interested in using music for ringtones. These are all comedy items, one from the Adult Swim website relating to The Venture Bros., and the others are from the popular Australian national daily radio show Get This with Tony Martin and Ed Kavalee. Here’s the technique:
You must use AAC (.m4a) files, so if your source is MP3, as all these were, use iTunes to convert them first. These all happened to be 128kbps mono, so I matched the bitrate but converted them to stereo in case there are any future incompatibility problems with mono. Here are the settings I used in Preferences > Advanced > Importing:
Then delete the files from iTunes and take them out of the trash and put them in a temporary folder. I found that if I Lostified from within iTunes, iTunes didn’t refile them as ringtones, so you have to do the tagging outside. Drag all these files to Lostify 0.7. You can change all the tags you like, but this is the important one, File Kind:
Apply this change to all your files (use the padlock next to the field so you don’t have to select it each time), then drag the files into iTunes. iTunes now sees them as ringtones and they will appear in the separate Ringtones library (you may need to turn on visibility in Preferences > General).
The Ringtones library behaves a little differently to the other libraries:
- You can’t drag these into a playlist.
- You can’t play all sequentially. If you play one, it will stop after finishing rather than starting the next in the list.
- You can’t use Album or Cover Flow views. You can tag ringtones with artwork, however.
So there’s a solution to create ringtones. Whether it works with an iPhone is questionable. I’d like to know if anyone using this technique finds success. For myself, it’s all a bit useless because I don’t have anything to use these with, but I enjoyed the opportunity to organise my ringtones into a separate library. Prior to this, these were in my music library, and of course, they aren’t music. It’s like when audiobooks were separated out into their own library. Much better organisation.
Update 15 Nov: With the advent of 1.1.2 iPhone and iPod Touch, it seems that you can easily add ringtones 30 seconds or less in length by renaming a .m4a file as .m4r and dragging into iTunes. I didn’t know that ringtones had a different extension. I still think it’s a good idea to Lostify them for completeness.