Filed under: iLife, How-tos, Tips and tricks, iTunes, TUAW Tips
TUAW Tip: Make iPhone ringtones with GarageBand
An earlier post about PocketMac Ringtone Studio for iPhone reminded me of how I put together ringtones for my iPhone. I just fire up GarageBand and iTunes, do a little quick magic, and out come the ringtones I want.
This doesn't work with protected files such as those you've purchased from the iTunes Store -- hell, Apple wants you to spend $0.99 for the tune and another $0.99 to turn it into a ringtone. The method described here works very well turning those CD snippets that you've ripped into iTunes into ringtones. Follow along after the break for the step-by-step.
1) Launch both iTunes and GarageBand '08.
2) In iTunes, select the tune that you want to grab a short ringtone from. GarageBand can perform its magic with regular MP3 files or with AAC-encoded (iTunes standard) files.
3) In GarageBand, create a New Music Project. You can do this either by closing an open project and then clicking the Create New Music Project button on the GarageBand splash screen, or by selecting New from the File menu. Select a name (in the example shown below, it's the name of the song -- Thomas Dolby's "Blinded Me With Science") and location to save the GarageBand project, then click Create.
5) Drag your selected tune from iTunes to GarageBand. The song is imported into GarageBand and a new music track appears:
6) Now comes the fun part -- listen to the song and pick out a short (30-40 second) snippet for be your ringtone. I seem to always pick the most recognizable part of the tune, which is usually a refrain or some hook that is memorable. As you play through the song and find the start of the ringtone, pause the playback, and move the playhead (the vertical red line) to about the beginning of the ringtone. Don't worry about getting it exactly since you can do some additional editing later.
7) You'll need to delete the music ahead of the start of your ringtone. To do this, click on the track to select it, then choose Split from the Edit menu to split the track at the playhead. Click the blank GarageBand work area to deselect the track, then click on the portion you want to delete and press the Delete key on your keyboard.
8) Figure out where the end of your ringtone is going to be and make sure that the playhead is situated somewhere close to it. Use the same technique described in step 7 to delete the music after the end of your ringtone. At t his point, you should have a short piece of the overall song to turn into a ringtone.
9) Drag the beginning of the ringtone all the way to the left side of the track timeline. This is probably a good time to save your GarageBand project as well.
10) Now, let's soften the beginning and end of the ringtone to cover up any mistakes we've made in editing. To do this, click on the track automation button. See that set of five buttons at the beginning of the track? Click the little downward pointing triangle to bring up track automation. We're going to set a fade-in and fade-out on our ringtone.
11) About a half-second or so into the beginning of the track, click the volume line to create an edit point (left, below). Next, click and drag the beginning of the volume line down to zero volume (right, below -- -144.0 db).
What you've just done is create a fade-in for the beginning of the ringtone. It starts off silently and builds to full volume in about a second. If you find that you need the fade-in to be longer or shorter, just move that second volume dot left or right.
12) Do the same for the end of the ringtone. Click the volume line to create an edit point about one second from the end of the ringtone. Then click and drag the end of the volume line down to zero volume (-144.0 dB).
13) Listen to the entire ringtone to make sure that the fade-in and fade-out sound good. If they do, save the project one more time. If they don't, adjust the fades and then save the project.
14) Now we need to make sure that the ringtone will repeat as your phone rings. To do this, click on the button to turn the cycle region on and off. What? You don't know what button this is? Look at the bottom of the GarageBand window. See the controls (screenshot below)? It's the one on the far right that looks like a set of arrows chasing each other:
14) Now we need to make sure that the ringtone will repeat as your phone rings. To do this, click on the button to turn the cycle region on and off. What? You don't know what button this is? Look at the bottom of the GarageBand window. See the controls (screenshot below)? It's the one on the far right that looks like a set of arrows chasing each other:
15) When you click that button, a bright yellow line appears above your track. Drag the right side of the line so that it matches the length of your ringtone (see below):
Doing this ensures that your ringtone will repeat over and over until you answer the phone or your caller goes to Visual Voice Mail. Do one final save of your project.
16) You're almost there! Go to the Share menu in GarageBand and choose "Send Ringtone to iTunes." Your project is converted to an iPhone ringtone that opens and plays in iTunes.
17) To move the ringtone to your iPhone, connect the iPhone while iTunes is open. Select the iPhone in the Devices list on the left side of iTunes, then click on the Ringtones tab. Make sure that Sync Ringtones is checked (see below), and select either All Ringtones or Selected Ringtones to sync with your iPhone. Click Sync, and your ringtone is copied to the iPhone.
16) You're almost there! Go to the Share menu in GarageBand and choose "Send Ringtone to iTunes." Your project is converted to an iPhone ringtone that opens and plays in iTunes.
17) To move the ringtone to your iPhone, connect the iPhone while iTunes is open. Select the iPhone in the Devices list on the left side of iTunes, then click on the Ringtones tab. Make sure that Sync Ringtones is checked (see below), and select either All Ringtones or Selected Ringtones to sync with your iPhone. Click Sync, and your ringtone is copied to the iPhone.
Have fun filling up your iPhone with custom ringtones!
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Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
Dr. Drang said 2:11PM on 7-08-2008
I'm pretty sure older versions of GarageBand can do everything except the "Send Ringtone to iTunes" step. But if you can save the audio clip as an AAC file on your Desktop, you can change the file extension to '.m4r' and drag it into the Ringtones section of your iTunes Library.
I already own Rogue Amoeba's Fission (mentioned upthread), so I do the excerpting in it instead of GarageBand. Because I find the process of making a ringtone easy to forget, I made a flowchart for it here
http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2008/06/iphone-ringtones-flowchart/
Reply
Dr. Drang said 2:12PM on 7-08-2008
I'm pretty sure older versions of GarageBand can do everything except the "Send Ringtone to iTunes" step. But if you can save the audio clip as an AAC file on your Desktop, you can change the file extension to '.m4r' and drag it into the Ringtones section of your iTunes Library.
I already own Rogue Amoeba's Fission (mentioned upthread), so I do the excerpting in it instead of GarageBand. Because I find the process of making a ringtone easy to forget, I made a flowchart for it here
http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2008/06/iphone-ringtones-flowchart/
Reply
alice said 9:12PM on 7-15-2008
I converted my song to ACC, dragged it to desktop, then renamed it to .m4r, then used garage band to edit it resent it to desktop as an ACC, renamed it again to .m4r, it marks it as a ringtone on my desktop....
BUT WHEN I TRY TO SEND IT TO ITUNES, A PLUS SIGN POPS UP AS IF IT IS GOING TO ADD IT TO MY RINGTONES BUT NOTHING HAPPENS......... PLEASE HELP >>>> FRUSTRATED :(
Justin said 11:51PM on 7-23-2008
I think renaming to .m4r is broken since the update to 7.7
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mark said 10:22AM on 7-25-2008
Oh not it's not.
http://www.hackthatphone.com/20/custom_audio.html
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Max said 2:46AM on 7-27-2008
My current version of Garage Band doesn't seem to have the "share" menu.... =(
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??? said 1:50AM on 7-29-2008
so i assume this doesn't work for older versions of garage band. i think mine is '06 or '07...i tried it and it said "send song to itunes" therefore not sending it to the ring tone sections. did i miss a step???
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Jeff said 4:33PM on 8-01-2008
So. Is there anyway to keep iTunes from deleting music and video when you sync a ringtone? I manually manage my music and videos and when I synced a new ringtone, bam! there went the music and videos. Will this happen every time?
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nurseluke said 9:37AM on 8-06-2008
My version of GarageBand (2.0.2--it says it is the most current--) offers: "export to ITunes" but does not recognize the file as a Ringtone, i.e. it does not, as so many versions of these instructions state, offer "send ringtone to ITunes."
I've tried this method a couple times now and put about 2 hours into it. I'm about to give IToner the $15. . . can anybody recognize this and help?
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Sabon said 11:28AM on 8-24-2008
After sharing to sending it to iTunes, Right click on the song and pick "show in finder".
Drag the song to your desktop.
Delete it out of iTunes
Change the extension or m4r.
Double click on the song and it should add it back to iTunes including to the iTunes section.
It worked for me.
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jeff said 10:36PM on 8-27-2008
Took a few tries but I eventually got my custom ringtone installed on the iPhone.Thanks for the help.
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crazy toney said 9:22PM on 8-30-2008
Thanks!! this is much easier then how I was doing them for my site - www.crazytoney.com
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jspan said 7:39PM on 9-11-2008
I did all of these steps and got the ringtones on my iphone, i can play them when i go to "sounds" but when i go to contacts to asign them only one shows up, which doesn't work anyways when the contact calls. Any help with this would be great as i made a lot of ringtones which took quite some time! thank you!
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Laze said 5:58PM on 9-22-2008
Plenty of free ringtones and alarmtones on the net too. I like the ones at http://www.iphoneringtones.ca because they're not all songs! I don't want my phone to ring like the radio!! They should call those songtones!
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