My wife wanted to set one of her favorite song to a ringtone in iPhone 3GS. She asked how she can do it and then I started to look at the device and I couldn’t find an easy way to do it. So after Googling little bit, I noticed that it’s not a trivial thing to do. I was little surprised when I noticed that iPhone 3GS doesn’t provide an easy way to set a song from your music library as a ringtone as you would normally do. Like you can do e.g. with N900! It requires iTunes to “convert” an audio file to a ringtone. Basically what Apple wants is that all the audio files must be bought from the iTunes store if you want to convert them to the ringtones, but wait. There is a workaround for that and I’m gonna tell you how to do it.

A ringtone is a “m4a” file, which is the default type for iTunes audio files (if I have understood it right), but the extension must be changed from “m4a” to “m4r” and the length of the file must exactly 30 seconds or less. So you can do a ringtone from what ever audio file you want by following these instructions:

  1. Import a CD to iTunes or use an existing album that is not bought from iTunes.
  2. Right click the song that you want to use as a ringtone and select “Get info” from the dialog.
  3. Select the “Option” tab and change the “start time” and the “end time” so that the length of the song is 30 seconds or less. You can make song to start from what ever start time and you can make it end to what ever time, but make sure that it doesn’t exceed the 30 seconds limit.
  4. Click “Ok” button and the dialog closes.
  5. Right click the song again, but this time select “Create AAC Version” and it will make a copy of that song with the length that you specified.
  6. Right click the new song and select “Show in Finder”.
  7. Change the extension from the “m4a” to “m4r” and go back to iTunes.
  8. Drag the new file to the desktop and remove it from the iTunes (delete it).
  9. Double click the file from the desktop and iTunes should start to play it.
  10. See if it has appeared in RingTones sections of iTunes.
  11. Sync your iPhone with iTunes and you should find your “home-made-ringtone”  on the device.

It has been a quite surprise for me that even this simple thing, like setting an audio file to a ringtone has been made so difficult in iPhone (if you haven’t bought that song from iTunes store). I just wonder why  do they want to control this great device so much? Why everything must go through the iTunes and even then it’s quite easy to find a workaround for their system? (money of course, but still…) This makes me feel bit confused  because Apple is doing a great product when it comes to the user experience, but in the same time they seem to do quite childish systems that don’t take too much time to go around. Another thing that makes me wonder how good they really are when it comes to the mobile development and security?  Usually it doesn’t take too much time to crack their baseband updates after they released them, like with the latest one.

My humble opinion is that iPhone is a great product because of the UX, but because of it is a closed system and they want to try to make too much money of it, it makes Apple to look bad in my eyes. Nokia is now trying to do completely opposite with N900 and Maemo which is the right way to go. So Apple, do not do closed systems, make them open and in the end you will gain more.

Btw, I’m planning to write a review “N900 vs. iPhone” let’s see when it’ll be ready.