There are not many things I don’t like about Apple “toys”, but I found one yesterday. My husband is the proud new owner of a used iPhone 6 Plus. It was easy to load all his Contacts, set up his email and load apps to match the ones on his iPad and retired Android phone.
The problem arose when he wanted his Hockey Night in Canada theme song as the default ringtone. Easy enough on the Android phone, download the tone from Zedge and point the phone to it. We started off fine, downloading the Zedge app to the iPhone and searching for the HNIC ringtone. No luck. It’s on the zedge.net website – but not in the app.
Now, this is not my first Apple rodeo – I’ve set up several generations of iPods, iPads, iPhones, and MacBook Pros. I’m pretty well-versed in how it all works. But jumping through the hoops of setting up a custom ringtone stumped me. I did eventually get it done but it took me the better part of an afternoon; mostly because I wouldn’t accept how complicated a process it is. I was sure, if I looked harder, I’d find a simpler way. But, after reading several posts and watching a couple of YouTube videos and finding nothing simple, here are the steps I finally used to get this done (documented here in case I need to do it again!):
- On your computer, download the ringtone you want to set up.
- Open up iTunes and import the file (File —> Add to Library, find the file in Downloads).
- Right-mouse click on the imported “song” and select Song Info.
- On the Song Info —> Options tab, make sure the length of the clip is no longer than 35 seconds by setting the Start and Stop time.
- Under Song Info —> File, check the Location.
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- If the file extension is .m4a you can move to step 6.
- If the file extension is anything other than .m4a:
- Close Song Info and select the “song” file.
- From the File menu, select Convert —> Create AAC Version. A duplicate “song” file will be created with the .m4a extension.
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- Plug your phone in and wait ’til it shows up in iTunes.
- Right-mouse click on the duplicate “song” file with the .m4a extension and select Open in Finder.
- Copy the file to your desktop or other easily accessible location.
- Change the extension of the file to .m4r this tells the iPhone that this is a ringtone.
- Drag the new file to the iTunes pane where your phone appears. Don’t worry about where to put it – the iPhone file systems will take care of adding it under Ringtones.
- Eject your iPhone from iTunes.
- On your iPhone, go to Settings —> Sounds —> Ringtone. Your new ringtone should appear at the top of the list. Select it and you’re good to go.
I hope this process goes more smoothly for you! And, if you do know of a simpler way? Please, please, let me know!