Managing Your iPhone Ringtones And Adding Your Own Ringtone to iPhone

A ringtone is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming call or text message. Not literally a tone, the term is most often used today to refer to customizable sounds used on mobile phones. And an iPhone supports ring tones in ".m4r" AAC format. The ".m4r" format is exactly the same as the ".m4a" format other than the possibility of including DRM style copy protection in an ".m4r" file.

The Sounds pane (Settings ➤ Sounds) allows you to choose how your iPhone responds to incoming calls and other events. Here, you can both set the volume of the ringtone and choose which ringtone to play when calls arrive.

To switch to a new sound, tap Ringtone, and choose any of the sounds listed. The iPhone plays it back for you to hear. When you’re satisfied with your selection, tap Sounds to set the ringtone and return to the previous screen.

In addition to setting ringtones, the Sounds pane allows you to choose whether to play sounds for new voicemail, new text messages, new mail, sent mail, calendar alerts, locking your iPhone, and keyboard clicks.

The iPhone just like other Smart Phones allows you to assign custom ringtones to individual contacts. This allows you to instantly know which contact is calling: a happy song for your spouse or an alarm for your boss (or vice versa, depending on how much you like your job).

Choose Phone ➤ Contacts, and select a contact. Scroll down the contact information page, and tap Assign Ringtone. Select a ringtone, and tap Save to select that sound or select Cancel to use the default ringtone for this contact.

Adding Custom Ringtones

As said above, the iPhone uses m4a audio files (AAC format) as ringtones. Although almost any sound file can be converted to this format in iTunes, third-party applications such as Ambrosia Software’s iToner2 (ambrosiasw) make this simple.

You can also turn a short segment of a song that you’ve purchased from the iTunes store into a ringtone. Here’s how:

• 1. Launch iTunes on your Mac or Windows computer.
• 2. To find songs that you’ve purchased in iTunes, click the Purchased icon under the Store listing. You will also see a Purchased icon for each device that you’ve used to buy iTunes content.
• 3. Click a purchased song in the list, and then select Store ➤ Create Ringtone. If it’s possible to convert a portion of the song into a ringtone, a small ringtone editor as shown in the below screen shot appears at the bottom of the iTunes screen. You can drag the highlighted area to any point of the song, make the ringtone longer (up to 30 seconds) or shorter, and choose to loop the ringtone over and over. There’s an adjustable time gap between rings as well.

• 4. When you’ve edited the ringtone to your satisfaction, click the Buy button to purchase the ringtone for $0.99. It is saved to your Library under a section titled Ringtones. If you are not interested to spend this money for a ring tone, follow this link to convert any mp3 to an iPhone ringtone. [http://www.pcworld.com/article/156234/turn_any_mp3_into_an_iphone_ringtone.html ]
• 5. Connect your iPhone to your computer. Under the Ringtones tab for your iPhone, make sure that Sync Ringtones is selected and that you have chosen either “All ringtones” or “Selected ringtones” to sync.
• 6. Click Apply, and the ringtones are transferred to your iPhone.