How to Make Free iPhone Ringtones with iTunes?

Those good, old days when creating an iPhone ringtone was as easy as renaming a song in your iTunes library to a ".m4r" extension and then syncing it back with your iPhone will never come back with the release of iTunes 8 – which brought with it Genius Playlists.

Keep in mind that iTunes will allow you to create a ringtone from a song downloaded through the iTunes Music Store, but those ringtones come with fees. No one likes fees. Follow this guide, creating iPhone ringtones for free using nothing more than iTunes comes back again.

To create simple, free iPhone ringtones from your iTunes library, the following step-by-step guide will help you out:

Note:
* This process works with MP3, ACC, and AIFF files.
* Only DRM-free songs can be used with this ringtone creation process.
* Any song downloaded from iTunes Music Store will have DRM (Digital Rights Management), so don't use those songs.
* Any song ripped from a CD or downloaded from DRM-free sources (P2P, Amazon, your friend) will work just fine.

Step 1. Launch iTunes.

Step 2. Find the song you'd like to turn in to a ringtone.

Step 3. Right click on the song and select "Get Info".

Step 4. Hit the "Options" tab and check both the "Start Time" and "End Time" boxes.

Step 5. Specify what time interval you'd like to use as your ringtone clip
Then click "OK"(Make sure your ringtone is 30 seconds or less!!).

Step 6. Click on "Advanced" in your menu bar
Select "Create AAC Version" or "Create Apple Lossless Version" (Make sure your iTunes "Import Settings" are set to "AAC" or "Apple Lossless" and not "MP3").

Step 7. A duplicate copy of your song will appear in iTunes
This new song will have the same filename but shorter "Time". Go back to the original song and uncheck those "Start Time" and "End Time" boxes.

Step 8. Drag the duplicate song to your Desktop
once the duplicate song is copied to your Desktop, delete the duplicate file in iTunes.

Step 9. On your Desktop, rename the file with the ".m4r" file extension
Use the new extension, this turns your song file into an iPhone ringtone file.

Your "songname.m4a" file should now be named "songname.m4r".

Step 10. Drag the newly renamed .m4r (songname.m4r) file back into iTunes.

Step 11. Drag the file over the "Library" column and release when "Library" becomes highlighted. (You have to delete the duplicate song file (Step 12) otherwise iTunes won't import your new .m4r file ).

Step 12. You should see your new ringtone under "Ringtones" in iTunes.

Step 13. Sync your iPhone to get jiggy with your new iPhone ringtones!

Apparently, this method is quite complicated and inconvenient, there are also a lot of limitations. To create custom ringtone from any audio/video you like for your iPhone, check How to Make Custom iPhone Ringtone on Mac.