How To Set Any Sound File As a Ringtone On Your iPhone

You can turn any standard sound file into a ringtone right on your iPhone using the free GarageBand app from Apple. You can also use some music from your library, and download audio files and music online, even from YouTube, to use as ringtones.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how you can use almost any sound file as a ringtone on your iPhone. 
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Okay, so you're not just stuck with the ringtones that come with your iPhone. You probably know that you can buy some. But you can also get just about anything for free. All you need is the actual sound file. So this could be something you made up or something you've downloaded or got form a collection. Any basic sound file that you have can be turned into a ringtone. The first thing you need though is the GarageBand app. So go to the Mac App Store, search for GarageBand, it's from Apple, and download it if you don't already have it on your iPhone. This is what you need to create ringtones.
Now before we go into the app let's look in the Files app because this is where you want to get your sound file. Whether this is a song from an artist that you've downloaded or it's something you've created or found in a collection you want to get it in the Files app. The Files app contains all the files that are in your iCloud Drive and also files that can be stored locally. So if I look here in the Files app I'll see all the different locations I've got. I've got iCloud Drive and I've got On My iPhone. You may have other things like DropBox or different Cloud services. If I look in iCloud Drive I'll see all the same folders that I should see on my Mac under iCloud Drive. 
Now I happen to have under Documents a folder called Sample Audio. In here I've got a few different files. Some Wave files and an MP3 file. Notice the Cloud icon next to a few of these. This means the files hasn't been downloaded yet. It's in the Cloud but not on your iPhone. You can just basically tap on the Cloud there and it will download. You want to make sure you have whatever file that you're going to use as the ringtone downloaded so it's ready to go.
Likewise you could be in Safari browsing a website with some free sound files and go to download some. For instance here's some at Archive.org. There's a lot of royalty free music there. I know Sound Cloud also is another place a lot of people go to get some. If you want to download something you could download it just like you do on a desktop computer. For instance I can tap and hold a link and it comes up with a list of options. One of those is Download Linked File. So I'll select that. 
Then I'll go back into the Files app. If I go up to the top level here and if I look under iCloud Drive you should see a Downloads folder. There, sure enough, just like a Downloads folder on the Mac there's the file that I downloaded. So if I want to get this file I could go to the Downloads folder. For those other ones they were in iCloud Drive in a Sample Audio folder.
So now that you know where the file is that you want to use you can go into GarageBand and use it to create a ringtone. I'm going to launch GarageBand and then I'm going to start off by creating a new project. There's a Plus button at the top right corner. I'm going to create that and you can use a lot of different things to start off a new project. It doesn't really matter because we're not going to use anything in the original project. I'm just going to select Audio Recorder that will create a new project. Then I'm immediately going to tap the button here at the top that allows me to see all the different tracks. 
Now I'm going to import that sound as another track. The way to do that is to tap the Loops button at the top right. You have different options here. You have Apple Loops, Files, and Music. As you can guess I'm going to go to Files here. Then I'm going to look for that file. So I'm going to tap the Browse Items from the Files App. Then it goes in here. You can actually see Recents and see those recent ones. I can go to Browse and I can dig down to find those files. So, for instance, I could go to that Downloads folder and there's that one file. Or I could go down into my Documents folder and find that Sample Audio folder.
So here I am in there. To use one of these I simply tap it and now it will appear here in this list. So you could see I've actually got two of them because I've selected it before. I need to tap and then drag over to the left to add it to the project as a separate track. You can see the audio wave form in there. It's ready to go. Now the one thing you may want to keep in mind is ringtone tones have to be short. Typically under 30 seconds. So the song is probably a lot longer than that, right. So you may want to go and cut it off. 
For instance I could move the playback head to some point here. You want to cut it right there. So I want to select it with a tap and then do a quick tap to bring up the menu and then hit Split. Then you get this little arrow with a scissors and all I need to do is swipe down to do a quick cut right there. Then I could select the right or the left half. I want to select the right half. Tap on that again and hit delete and I got rid of the rest of that track. Of course you're probably going to take more time to do this to figure out exactly where the point is that you want to cut the song off. You can rewind with that button and hit Play to hear it. Then Stop and keep adjusting to where you want it to be. If you want to extend the song you can drag the end here and you can see the rest of the song is still there. So you can drag or reduce the amount to get it just right.
Then you can exit the song by tapping here and going to My Songs and you go up a level. Now let's go and name this. I'm going to tap and hold and if I swipe down I could hit Name. So I can name this My Ringtone. Now all I need to do is tap and hold it again and select the bottom option there, Share. If I tap that you can see one of the options is to share it as a Ringtone. Tap that and it will allow me actually to rename the ringtone if I want in there. Also for future reference if you want to Delete ringtones you've created tap on your ringtones right here on this screen. Right here you can Edit and Delete them or swipe to delete them. So it's kind of counterintuitive to go back into GarageBand to delete ringtones but that's how you do it.
So all I need to do now is hit Export and it will export as a ringtone and I end up here where I could just hit OK. But I also could hit Use Sound As and immediately assign it as my Standard Ringtone or Text Tone or to a specific contact. But I don't have to right now. I could just hit Done or I could have hit OK before. Now back under Settings I could go into Sounds & Haptics and I could change the ringtone. So I hit Ringtone here and I could select this new ringtone. You could see it lists it right there, My Ringtone. I could also set it as my Text Tone or use it any other place you use a ringtone on your iPhone.
Now there is another place you could get music for a ringtone. Notice if I go to the Loops here I have Apple Loops and Files. But I also have Music. What I could do is select something from my music library. Now what you're not going to be able select are songs that are from Apple Music because they're protected. What you can select are songs you've ripped from CD's. So if you have those in your collection they should show up here. But they have to be downloaded. If you're using Apple Music or iTunes Match you don't actually have your song on your device. It just shows up in the list. You have to go into the Music App and actually play it so it downloads and it's on your phone. That's the main reason why you wouldn't see something available here.
So here in this list I have mostly gray songs. But I have a few that are actually songs that I've ripped from CD's a long time ago and that's how they're part of my music collection. So I could actually select that. Notice here in this interface I actually drag it right from the list into GarageBand.
Another place to get music from is if you search YouTube for royalty free music you'll come up with lots of music there that it appears you could download legally and use as you like. Then you could search for websites that allow you to convert YouTube videos to MP3 downloads. There are a lot of sites like that. They are really sketchy and have tons of ads on them so I'm not even going to show you one. But you put the YouTube URL into that site and it will produce an MP3 and you can download it and then use it just like I used the file here in this tutorial. Of course you can use that for any royalty free music you find at YouTube and technically you can use it for anything you find at YouTube although it wouldn't be legal to do it for a song that's under copyright.

Comments: 14 Responses to “How To Set Any Sound File As a Ringtone On Your iPhone”

Bill Sinclair

5 years ago

Way too geeky.

Russell Tolman

I would love to know if you can do this on an iMac?

thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

Russell: For FaceTime on your Mac? I haven't looked into it too closely, but it looks like you can't without disabling System Integrity Protection -- if that is the case, definitely not worth it. Just use one of the included ringtones.

Oops; sorry I wasn't clear with my question. How can I create ringtone on my iMac that I can then transfer to my iPhone; It would be for use on my iPhone.
I hope that is clear?

Can I create the ringtone on my iMac ?

Russell: Create any kinds of sound using any sound app you like. Then transfer that to the iPhone (via iCloud, AirDrop, etc). Then bring that in to GarageBand on your iPhone just like I show here in this video.

Gene

Is there a way to assign a specific ringtone to multiple contacts in the Contacts list quickly? Or, do you have to go to each contact and assign them individually?

Gene: Individually.

Lance

Gary,

When I get to the step to drag the wav file into the ios garageband, it only brings in the first 9 seconds of the clip. It doesn't allow me to stretch the clip to the right to get more of the clip. I'm using a 10XR iphone. Thoughts?

Lance: Sounds like something is wrong with the wav file.

Gary, It turns out the section setting was set to Manual. As soon as I changed it to Automatic, it loaded the whole clip.

Interestingly, on my iPhone XR, I could not find a way to time the clip to make sure it was under 30 seconds. So, I went to a time website and played the clip while looking at the time. Any other ideas in app?

Lance: Just look at the measures/beats at the top. 4/4 would be 4 beats per measure so at 120 tempo (beats per minute) that would be 30 measures per minute or 2 seconds per measure.

Stan

4 years ago

Gary, when I save my MP3 file as a ringtone the file size goes from 481 KB to 5.5 MB. Looks like that happened on your video too. Is there any way to keep the ringtone from getting so big?

Stan: 5.5 MB isn't big. You may be able too play with the compression used in some other audio app to bring it down, but unless you plan on having like 1,000 ringtones on your phone, it isn't worth worrying about.

Comments Closed.

How To Set Any Sound File As a Ringtone On Your iPhone

Comments: 14 Responses to “How To Set Any Sound File As a Ringtone On Your iPhone”

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