Make a Ringtone From Any Song

Completely. No account, no card, no daily cap, no watermark tone spoken over your clip and no limit on how many you make. Everything runs on your own device, so a ringtone costs us nothing to produce and there is nothing to charge you for.

Two routes, both of them Apple's own. On the phone: open GarageBand, import the .m4r you just downloaded into an empty project (the Files browser inside GarageBand can reach your Downloads), then press and hold that project in My Songs and use the share option for a ringtone — GarageBand installs it into your sound settings itself. On a computer: connect the iPhone, open it in Finder on a Mac or in the Apple Devices app on Windows, and drag the .m4r onto the device. It then shows up in the ringtone list in Settings. Apple renames and reshuffles these menus between releases, so treat the exact wording as a hint; the two gestures themselves have not changed in years.

An iPhone does not let you point at an arbitrary audio file and call it a ringtone. It plays tones from its own library, and that library takes AAC audio in an .m4r. The good news is that an .m4r is nothing exotic: it is the same AAC stream an .m4a carries, under the extension iOS looks for. This tool writes it that way from the start, so there is no renaming trick, no desktop app and no cable required to produce the file itself.

Keep it to 30 seconds or under. That is what iOS works with, and honestly it is longer than a ringtone ever needs to be — a call goes to voicemail before most tones finish once. When the iPhone side of the switch is selected, the tool caps the selection at 30 seconds and tells you if you drag past it.

Save the MP3 and then take whichever of these two routes your phone offers: Settings, then Sound (or Sound & vibration), then Ringtone, and pick the file from the list — or open the Files app, press and hold the MP3, and look for something like "Set as ringtone". A few skins, Samsung's in particular, only list files that sit in the Ringtones folder in internal storage, so move it there in the Files app if it does not appear. Every manufacturer words these menus differently, so go by whichever label looks closest.

No. Decoding the file, drawing the waveform, making the cut and encoding the AAC or MP3 all happen inside this tab, in a WebAssembly build of FFmpeg. Your song never becomes a network request. If you would rather verify that than take our word for it, open DevTools, switch to the Network panel and make a ringtone: the only traffic you will see is the one-off download of the encoder itself.

Keep the one-second fade-out that is switched on for you. A ringtone repeats until you answer, and without a fade every loop starts with an audible click — the surest sign of a home-made tone. A fade-in is usually the wrong call, though: the opening second is the part your phone actually plays before you reach for it, and starting quiet throws it away.

Use music you have the rights to. Cutting a track you own for your own handset is private use and nobody is coming after you; distributing it, selling it or building a ringtone pack out of somebody's single is a different matter entirely. If you want a tone that is unambiguously yours — and that nobody in the room will recognise as their own phone — generate an original piece of music with AI instead, then cut it here. It takes about a minute and settles the licensing question before it comes up.