Unfortunately, the iPhone doesn’t have a great choice of ringtones. The default ones on the iPhone aren’t great at all, and most people just want to use their own ringtones, like most cell phones can do. Luckily, it is possible to use your own custom ringtones on the iPhone for free, although it’s more work than usual.

The first step in this process is opening iTunes. Open the software, find the song in your Music Library and right-click it. Then, click “Get Info”. Open the “Options” tab.

The iPhone doesn’t support ringtones longer than 40 seconds, so you need to set the song to only play for 40 seconds. Enable the “Start” and “Stop” using the check boxes and then enter 0:00 and 0:40. Click “OK” and you’ll be back in your Music Library again. The next step is to right-click your song once again but this time click the “Create AAC Version”. This will convert your song into the correct format for a ringtone. When it’s finished converting (It shouldn’t take long), right click the new song (It should be below the original song on the list) and click “Show in Windows Explorer”.

For this next step, you need to make sure that you can see the file extensions of files in Windows Explorer. Click “Tools” and then “Folder Options” and then the “View” tab. Find the checkbox which says “Hide extensions for known file types” and make sure that the checkbox is unticked.

Now, go back into the Windows Explorer which shows your new created music file. It should be a .m4a file. Rename the file from .m4a to .m4r. You may get a warning about it from Windows, but just ignore this. Now you should have a .m4r file which is of 40 seconds in length. This is all we need.

Simply go back into iTunes and drag this new file into your library, and that’s the ringtone created. Just sync your iPhone with iTunes now and your ringtone should transfer. If you go into your iPhone and then into “Settings” –> “Sounds” and then “Ringtone”, you should see your newly created ringtone on the list under “Custom”.

You should now have your custom ringtone set on your iPhone, completely free.