How come that I have a $299 state-of-the-art mobile phone and can’t do simply things available in $80 Nokias?

I have a pretty capacious MP3 player and can not select any of its thousands songs as a ringtone!?

Of course, Apple provides a method por uploading new ringtones to the iPhone, but most of them either involves money or are quite discouraging.

I finally found my own way to upload any song as a ringtone. Nothing big, I just took a look to iPhone’s internal folders.

You need to be able to upload files to your iPhone by some means (Samba, SCP, etc).

1. Edit your ringtone with your sound editing tool of preference and store it in a format like mp3.
2. Convert the audio file to AAC. I use iTunes to convert files from MP3 to AAC (.m4a). For this to be possible make sure you have iTunes set to import files with AAC Encoder.
3. Add your ringtone mp3 to iTunes Library. Right click on it and select “Convert Selection to AAC”. When the process finishes, check the generated file under your iTunes folder (somewhere like C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\).
4. Copy your converted AAC file into the Library\Ringtone folder under your iPhone root directory.
5. Rename its extension from .m4a to .m4r.

The next time you try to change the ringtone, your uploaded file will appear in the list.