Save Money on iPhone Ringtones

Ringtones let you customize your iPhone with tunes and sounds you like, even allowing you to assign specific ringtones to individual contacts in your phone. But where do you get ringtones for the iPhone? Can you use a piece of a song already in your iTunes library used as a ringtone?

The easiest way to add a ringtone to your iPhone is to buy it on the iTunes Store, usually for either 99¢ or $1.29. Of course that would the easy way, but who wants to spend money for a ringtone of a song you already own?

You can, however, create your own ringtones using songs you own without spending money—and you can even use iTunes to help you do it—but it does require some extra effort.

It's not exactly easy to create a new ringtone from a song you own that's in your iTunes library, but it can be done in a few steps. Songs you want to use must be ones you owned and saved on your local hard drive (i.e., they can't be in the cloud or streamed from the internet).

When you are finished creating your ringtone, don't forget to go back and restore the changes to your import settings and remove the start and stop times on that original song.

In your iTunes library, select the original song file. Right-click the song and select Song Info. Click the Options tab and uncheck the boxes next to start and stop.

Click OK.

Click iTunes (on a Mac) or Edit (on a Windows PC) > Preferences > General. Click Import Settings.

Click the Setting dropdown and select your original setting.

Now that you've created your ringtone file, you need to add it to your iPhone so it's available to assign.

If you want to venture beyond your music library and iTunes, then a good source of ringtones are websites that allow you to download them for free. Often, though, the problem here is that finding ones that are both free and legal (i.e., not restricted for use by copyright).

You may have already visited countless websites that offer "free" tones, only to discover they're not truly free when you try to download them. You might be required to pay a subscription fee, or the site might redirect you to another unrelated site full of advertisements but no ringtone.

There are websites that do offer legitimately free tones, however. Here are a few, some of which also offer other content such as videos, games, apps, wallpapers, and more.

The Zedge app offers ringtones of a wide range, though they aren't going to be clips of hot current songs. Some are pleasant tones, some are voice tones of varying quality (some are pretty hokey), and some are other random sounds and effects.

The interface is not great. If you want to browse what's available, you'll have to scroll through an interminable list—though there's a categories header under search, there are no actual categories to choose from.

Tones7 has a nice range of ringtone types, and a sizable list of categories to make browsing for that perfect ringtone easier. These are also not going to be top Billboard hits.

Notification Sounds provides ringtones that are created on synthesizers. If you're looking for bleeps, twoops, and martian ray guns, you'll find these here.

You can use audio-editing software to make ringtones. These apps can seem complicated at first, but all you really need to do is import a song from your library and then export a 30-second audio loop.

For example, using Audacity to create free ringtones is fairly easy. It's among the most popular apps for this purpose, but you can choose from many other free audio editors, too. It's just a matter of finding one you feel comfortable with.