I have had some people ask me about how to create ringtones for their iPhones, so I thought I would do a quick tutorial. On the mac you can also use garageband, but I personally prefer to use Quicktime Pro. These same instructions should also work on Windows with Quicktime Pro as well.
The first thing I do is create a ringtones folder somewhere on the computer. I simply put it in my documents folder, so it is easy to find.
Now in iTunes find the song that you want to convert to a ringtone and simply drag it to your desktop.
iTunes makes a copy of the file on the desktop, so we are not modifying the original.
Right click on the file and choose open with Quicktime player.
Ringtones can only be a maximum of 30 seconds, so we have to trim the song. You can use the little sliders that appear below the play head to adjust the area of the song you want to keep. Look at the picture to get an idea of how this works.
Now that we have an area selected chose edit from the menu bar and then trim to selection. Now the clip will only play the area you have selected. You can do some more fine tuning if the clip still happens to be over 30 seconds long and repeat the steps above until you have it exactly the way you want.
The next step involves exporting the file. Go to file on the menu bar and then export.
Under export choose movie to mpeg-4 as shown. You can export this file now to your ringtones folder. Just chose your destination and click save.
Now you can rename the exported mp4 file to however you want the file to show up on your iPhone.
This next step is very important. You need to change the extension of the file from .mp4 to .m4r This tells iTunes that the file is a ringtone.
Go back to iTunes and select ringtones from the item list located on the left hand side of the iTunes Window. Now drag your ringtone over to the white space area and it should show up.
Now you need to setup your iPhone to sync the ringtones. Plug in your iPhone and select it from iTunes. Click on the ringtones tab and chose sync ringtones.
The ringtone now should show up on your iPhone after the next sync. Hopefully these instructions make some kind of sense.