Create customized ringtone on Mac for free with Garageband

It’s kind of boring to use the same ringtones as other people do; and it’s definitely embarrassing when you try to answer your call and find out it was actually a phone call for a guy next to you. Well, it happens a lot to iPhone users because it was not so easy to customize the ringtones before.

Well, Apple made it much easier with the new iPhone firmware and iTunes. You can simply synchronize the ring-tones exits in your iTunes Library to your iPhone and you can have your special ring-tones in just seconds.

However, it’s not so easy; the problem is “How do you create the ringtone?”

The easiest way to do it is, purchase a song from iTunes Store, and cut clip you like out of the song. Then convert it into a ringtone. It’s so simple.

You might want to ask, “What if I’ve already owned the song on CD?” or “What if the song I like is not available on iTunes Store?” In cases like these, no matter how easy Mac OS X is, I must say, sorry, you can’t just create-and-sync. You need to show some extra work to achieve what you wanted. Let’s create ringtones on iTunes without purchasing the song from iTunes Store.

People might be interested in some third party software to help them convert ringtones for use. Yet, without wasting your hard drive storage and system memory, Apple has already provided us the best native tool for doing the job. That is Garageband comes with iLife in the new generations of Mac OS X. And today, I will be using Garageband ’09 and the lastest version iTunes 8.2.1 to show you the trick.

1.First let’s start up Garageband:

2. Next, we will probably want to delete this piano track and add a new basic track for our music/soundtrack

3. Drag your music/soundtrack on to the “Basic Track” that’s just created:

Obviously we don’t want the whole song as our ringtone as it’s boring at the beginning and you will most likely miss all the phone calls if you don’t turn on vibration of your phone. We just want the best part of the song as our ringtone, and we need to trim it out. Here is a simple way to do:

4. Trim clip:

Click on the time-line at where you want your clip starts from, then hit “command” and “T” at the same time, your clip will be splited into two clips.

Same for the ending, click on the time-line at where you want your clip stops, then hit “command” and “T”, now you will have 3 clips on the track.

The next thing you would like to do is to delete the 2/3 clips that you don’t need. just click on the workspace and then select the first clip, hit “Delete”, and same to delete the third one.

Now you will have the last clip, and this is the one you would like to be your ringtone. Drag it to the front where time-line starting at 1. If you don’t do this, you will hear nothing until the music time-line hits your favorite part.

5. Export music to iTunes as ringtone

6. However, you will most likely get this warning:

To resolve this, simply choose “Adjust”, and we will need to change the ringtone length:

7. See the control bar above the sound track? You can drag it the same length as your audio track and then repeat step 5.

Just let it convert for a few seconds, your iTunes window should be pop up and check your “Ringtones”, your newly created ringtone should be there and now you can synchronize with your iPhone and make it special in groups of iPhone users.