It has been always critical to add music and tones in iPhone due to over control in file library in iPhone, iPad, iPod etc. Recently I have updated my iOS in my iPhone 5 to iOS 7. I love the new operating system with brand new interface even though I don’t like just a few things. The ringtones are nice but may be not so suitable for elderly people due to soft sound and I found it hard to notice from another room when someone is calling. Anyway people always has different taste and feelings about anything in this world due to unique DNA and we have the freedom to do so.
Let’s start the tutorial how to add ringtones into your default iTune library. By the way I am using Windows 7 operating system for this tutorial however similar process can be done in MAC OSX. First of all lets open the iTune library and go to playlist and create a new playlist called “Ringtones” see the image below –
Once you created the playlist then lets add some files. Click on the down arrow in the top left in iTunes. If you cannot see the menu bar, you can just click on the “show menu bar” from the dropdown list. Now click on file and then “add file to library”. This will take you to browse files window then you select the files you want to add in the iTune library. See the screen below when files are added and I have done column sorting with time asc to see the ringtones first.
Now this files are in mp3 format and iPhone does not recognize mp3 files as ringtones so we have to convert them into m4r format then we can add them to iPhone tones library. I have highlighted all the files that I want to upload to iPhone and then right click on them and click on “Create AAC version”. Basically this will create low bit rate music files. Once they created you can go to your library and you should be able to see all the new files added there. See the screen capture below –
Now right click on the file and click on “Show in Windows Explorer” . It should open the file location and you can see the extension of the files as shown below.
The default location of these files will be in iTunes media folder in my case they are in C:\Users\mohammedta\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Unknown Artist\Unknown Album
Now If you cannot see the extension of the files then you have to change the setting in the Folder option to display extensions for known files. By default it is turned off so that it does not display the file extension if it is known by windows file extension library.
Now we got the files in .m4a format and we have to change the extension to .m4r to upload in iPhone 4/5 as ringtones. You can rename them manually and it will give you a warning when renaming the file extension like below –
You just click on yes to go ahead with the rename. This will take quite sometimes to rename specially if you have hundreds of files. In my case I have over 100 ringtones and I don’t want to spend much time renaming them manually. Well in this case I have used windows dos command to rename the batch with new extension. To do that open the command prompt, click on start then type “cmd” in the smart search box. It will display the command prompt on the top of the list and click on this to open it. Remember you have run this as admin user to execute command.
Change the working directory to your ringtone files folder. To change the working directory type –
cd C:\Users\mohammedta\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Unknown Artist\Unknown Album
then hit the enter key it should change the working directory to this folder now. To rename all the files with the new extension (.m4r) type again –
ren *.m4a *.m4r
then hit the enter key again. You will see the magic, in a second it will rename all the files with the new extension .m4r like below –
Next thing is now we have to add them in the iTune library as we have renamed the files. To add them back to the library, open iTunes and make sure you iPhone is connected through the cable.
It should register your phone in iTunes automatically when connected. Now select the Tones from the library in the left top menu. See the image below –
If you cannot see the tones library at the bottom of the list then you have to go to preferences and turn it on. Select the Tones library it will display if there is any tones added like below –
Now to add new files here, you just open the folder and drag them across to tones library.
Final thing you have to do is to sync with your iPhone so that they will be carried over to your device. To do this click on your phone from the right top menu in iTunes then click on Tones. In this screen you can sync the whole library or you can do the selected file to sync with your iPhone. In my case I have just uploaded a few selected tones. See the screen below –
Enjoy the new ringtones and let me know if you have any issue.