Creating or Importing your own Ringtones into iTunes

Jesse Hollington
By Jesse Hollington - Senior Editor
Creating or Importing your own Ringtones into iTunes

While Apple still allows you to purchase alert tones directly from the iTunes Store, many users may already have their own sound effects or songs that they already own that they’d like to use as ringtones or alert tones.

Creating or Importing your own Ringtones into iTunes

Unfortunately, while iTunes doesn’t provide any way to do this directly, if you already have a short sound file in the AAC format you can actually import it straight into the “Tones” section in iTunes simply by renaming the file, changing the extension from M4A to M4R before importing it.

If your file is longer than about 30 seconds and/or in a format other than AAC, however, you’ll need to take some additional steps.

By Jesse Hollington Senior Editor
Jesse Hollington was a Senior Editor at iLounge. He's written about Apple technology for nearly a decade and had been covering the industry since the early days of iLounge. In his role at iLounge, he provided daily news coverage, wrote and edited features and reviews, and was responsible for the overall quality of the site's content.