Perspective

There was once a time when I told a friend of mine that she was wasting a good bottle of Nobel One (a really yummy bottle of sweet wine), because she was using it as a cooking wine.

I actually told her I would have never brought her that bottle if I knew she was going to cook with it.

Good wine is for drinking not cooking.

-- I get like that with alcohol sometimes --

I used to anyway. Yesterday, I flavored my cardamom mushroom cream sauce with a couple of tablespoons of Hennessy VSOP Cognac.

Funny how somethings change over time.

Customised Ringtone for iPhone 3G

The iPhone is great. Its more than just a phone, its an iPod with a some-what-ok camera and a game console all in one. But the real downside I found with the iPhone is the ability to set your own customised ringtone.

The 20 odd or so, that comes with the phone really doesn't do much for me. $0.99 a ringtone isn't expensive. But if I wanted to set a funky Cantonese pop song on it, I haven't seen any available.

So here is how I've been able to add customised ring tones via iTunes (without having to download some 3rd party app).

This is for a iPhone 3G on iTunes 7.7.1.11

1. Go to iTunes
   
2. Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Importing -- Make sure 'Import Using' is set to AAC Encoder.
3. Select the song you want to make into a ringtone
4. Right click on the song list, and select 'get info' -> Options
5. Under Options, input a start time and stop time with an interval of 30secs.
6. Click on ok to close the tab
7. Right click on the file again, and select 'Convert Selection to AAC'. (this creates a 30sec clip)
8. Sort the songs list by Time (click on the column header). And your new song should appear with a time of 0:30.
   
9. Right click on the song list with 0:30 and select 'Show in Windows Explorer'
10. The song clip should appear in .m4a format.
    
11. Rename the file to .m4r (note: icon should still be the iTunes icon)
12. In iTunes delete the song list referring to the 0:30 sound clip. Make sure you remove the reference link only and not the file.
13. Close iTunes
14. Connect iPhone
    
15. Double click on the .m4r file. This should open iTunes and show the file in the 'ringtone' section if your iPhone is connected.
16. Sync iPhone
17. New Ringtone will appear under the 'Custom' Heading in Settings -> Sounds.
    

Important Notes:

Point 3 - You don't have to start at 0:00. But your ringtone clip cannot be more than 30 secs

I'm not the first one to come up with these instructions (I believe many have done so before me). This is what I put together after a couple of google searches and playing around on the iPhone at home. This is works for me on my version of iTunes on the iPhone 3G.

Surprisingly most of the links that came up in my initial search on Google for ways to get free ringtones on the iPhone is for the pre-3G version. Most also put updates in their posts that it no longer works with the later patches that apple have rolled out.

For now, this does still seem to work for me and I guess they will until the next updated patch when Apple decides to fix this.

Enjoy :)