How To Easily Create Your Own Custom iPhone Ringtone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you the easiest way to create your own custom ringtone on your iPhone.

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Now on your iPhone you can choose from a variety of different ringtones that Apple provides or you can download ringtones from the iTunes Store. But you can also just create your own. The way to do this is in the GarageBand App. Now I'm going to show you the absolute simplest way to do it. 

So first get GarageBand for your iPhone. Just go to the App Store. Search for GarageBand. It's from Apple and it is free. Once you have that app just launch GarageBand. Now what you see when you first launch GarageBand may not look like this. I've already gotten a few songs in here. But what you're basically going to do is you are going to create a new song. So I'm going to tap the Plus button there at the top. This is what you're probably see when you first use GarageBand and you don't have anything there. Now you can use a variety of different instruments and mechanisms for recording music and sound. But the one we're going to use here is the simplest and it is just the voice or Audio Recorder. 

You can tap on this or I can tap on the little microphone there at the bottom left. It will start a new project and go right into Voice Record Mode. Now there is a couple of things you want to change before you record. One is, you want to turn Off the metronome. So tap there. Make sure the metronome is white, not blue. It'll still count into the beginning of the recording but you won't hear the ticks of the metronome as you record. Now the next things you want to do is tap this Plus button all the way here to the right. That's going to show you that you've got one section here, Section A, and it is 8 bars. You don't want to have a set time for recording. You want to tap that and set it to Automatic instead. So now whatever you record, whether it is 4 seconds or 14 seconds that will be the length of this track. 

Now I'm going to tap Record here and then I'm going to record just my voice saying something and use that as a ringtone. But you could record anything that your mic can pickup. So it could be any sound that you can get in your environment or any sound that you could play, say, on another device and have it come out of the speakers. Now as someone who loves music I cringe at the idea of recording something with a microphone that is playing on a speaker, especially if it is music. That's not the proper way to do it. But copyright protection often prevents you from recording a song directly. While you can actually take a song, convert it to a regular audio track and bring it here in GarageBand, there are a lot more steps involved. What I really want to show here is a very simple way to create a ringtone from anything. If it is not going to sound perfect that's fine. This is just a ringtone for you. Something for your phone to play when somebody calls or you get a text message and it will help you identify who it is who is calling or texting you and maybe just put a smile on your face because of the sound or music you've chosen. 

Okay. So I'm going to tap record, (metronome ticking, Gary speaking, ring ring). You could see I've tapped the Stop button there at the top. I can now tap here to go back and then I could play, (ring, ring) and see what I've got. Now there are a ton more things that you could do here in GarageBand. If you tap here you'll see your track, what you've just recorded, and for instance I can trim it a little bit. Maybe get rid of some of the silence at the beginning. Move it over like that. I could, of course, tap here and add another type of track. Even using a musical instrument and playing around with all of the music features of GarageBand. 

But to keep things simple here I'm just going to use this. Now that I've recorded it I'm going to tap here at the top left and go back to my songs. You could see this is the most recent song that I've recorded right here. If I wanted to I could tap where the title is and I can give it a name. Hit Done. There it is there. Now how does it become a ringtone on my iPhone? Well, I just tap and hold it and it will bring up a menu. Then I go down to Share. One of the options for sharing is Ringtone. I tap that. It will allow me to choose a different name for the ringtone if I want. Then I just tap Export. Now that it is done I can immediately use this as a ringtone for something by tapping Use Sound As. You can see I can choose it as my Standard ringtone, text tone, or assign it to a specific contact. 

Now even if I don't use that right away I can always go into Settings and then to Sounds & Haptics. Then for the different things that use ringtones, like Ringtone. I can select that and I'll find that ringtone there and I can assign it. So now I can assign it to Text Tone as well. In Contacts I can go to any Contact, like this one here, tap Edit and then I can assign a ringtone to this specific Contact. 

One thing to keep in mind is that Ringtones need to be relatively short. Remember they repeat so there is no reason to build in something repetitive into your own ringtone. Just keep it to a few seconds. Anything longer than 30 seconds will actually be cutoff at 30 seconds. So you can record some music, your own music, some prerecorded music that you're playing. You can record a sound effect or something that you find interesting to use as a ringtone. Or just use your voice and actually have the ringtone identify who it is that is calling or texting you. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.