iOS 5 now comes with the ability to make your own text tones.
You will need:
1. A music file.
2. iTunes 10.5.
3. An iDevice running iOS 5 to sync it to.
The ability to make your own ringtones has been a around for quite some time. With the release of iOS 5 yesterday, Apple seems to have let it slide under the door that you can make your own free text tones the same exact way that you can make a ringtone. This guide will explain how to do it.
First, you need to get a music file that you want to convert to a text or ringtone. For text tones, I only recommend 3-5 seconds since if you pick a song you will hear the entire song every time you get a text message. For this guide, I will be using Dethklok's Deth Tone, available for free as an .MP3 file here. I downloaded the file to my desktop:
After you have saved the music file that you want, right click it and click, "open with" and select iTunes:
So now, the .MP3 file should be in your iTunes library. The next step is to right click the file you just added to iTunes and click the, "Create AAC version" option, as shown below:
iTunes will convert the .MP3 file into a .M4a file. Once the process is complete, you can delete the .MP3 file from both your desktop, and from iTunes, this will leave only the .M4a file in iTunes. Once you do that, click and drag the .M4a file from iTunes to your desktop. This should leave you with a .M4a file on your desktop, shown below:
Now that you have the .M4a file on your desktop, you need to change it to a ringtone file. To do this, simply right click it, and select, "Get Info" as shown below:
When the get info window appears, you need to rename the file from .M4a to .M4r so that iTunes will recognize it as a ringtone file instead of a music file. To do this, look at the image below:
Changing the file extension makes the file a ringtone file instead of a music file. So now, you can just right click it, select, "Open With" and pick iTunes, shown below:
When the file in imported to iTunes you will notice that it appears in the Ringtons section instead of the Music section. This indicates that when you sync your iDevice, the ringtone you just made will me available in the ringtones section of your iDevice. Your iTunes should look something like this:
