How to make a ringtone: choosing the clip, length, fades and format

To make a ringtone, cut a short, recognisable section of a song, usually 20 to 30 seconds of the chorus, add a short fade in and out, and save it in a format your phone accepts: MP3 works on Android, while iPhones use an .m4r file. The ringtone maker does the cutting, fading and MP3 encoding in your browser, so the song never leaves your device.

Picking the right part

A ringtone has to work in the first two seconds, because that is often all you hear before answering or silencing it. The chorus or the main hook usually works best. Avoid long intros, quiet verses and sections that depend on a build-up. Start the clip on a strong beat, just before the vocal or riff enters, rather than in the middle of a phrase. In the ringtone maker, click the waveform to centre the selection on that point, then nudge the start until the preview begins cleanly. A distinctive instrumental riff can work even better than a vocal line, because it stays recognisable at low volume and from another room.

Length and fades

About 30 seconds is the classic ringtone length, and long enough, since calls rarely ring longer before going to voicemail. A ringtone loops if the phone keeps ringing, so a fade-out stops the restart sounding like a glitch. The ringtone maker allows clips from 5 to 40 seconds, with a 1 second fade-in and 2 second fade-out by default. A short fade-in prevents a click at the start; keep it brief so the hook still lands immediately. For finer editing, such as removing a section in the middle, the audio trimmer and the audio fade tool give you more control.

Making it audible

Phone speakers are small and reproduce little bass. A section carried by a deep bass line or kick drum can sound weak, while vocals, guitars and synth leads cut through. Quiet recordings also suffer; if your clip sounds faint next to the built-in tones, raise its peak level with the audio normalizer before you make the ringtone. Do not push it into distortion: a ringtone that is clean and bright is easier to hear in a pocket than one that is loud and muddy.

Ringtones on Android

Android accepts common formats such as MP3, and the ringtone maker saves MP3 at 192 kbps, which is far more quality than a phone speaker can reveal. On most phones you can either open the file and choose to set it as the ringtone, or copy it into the Ringtones folder in the phone's storage, after which it appears in the sound settings alongside the built-in tones. Menus vary between manufacturers, so look under Sound and vibration, or search the settings for "ringtone". A WAV option is there too if you prefer uncompressed audio, although the file is several times larger; How MP3 compression works, and which bitrate you can actually hear explains the difference.

Ringtones on iPhone

iPhones use .m4r files, which are AAC audio in an MPEG-4 container with a different extension, and they only accept custom ringtones through Apple's own tools. The usual routes are GarageBand on the iPhone, which can share a project as a ringtone, or syncing from a computer with Finder or iTunes. The ringtone maker cannot write .m4r directly, so export the MP3 and import it into GarageBand. Keep iPhone ringtones to 30 seconds or a little more; around 40 seconds is the commonly reported maximum, which is why the tool stops there.

Copyright and alert tones

Making a ringtone from music you own, for your own phone, is widely tolerated as personal use, although the law varies by country; sharing or selling ringtones made from commercial songs is not allowed without a licence. Use your own recordings, music you have the rights to, or freely licensed sounds when in doubt. For notification and alarm sounds, keep clips much shorter, from under a second to a few seconds. You can also make one from scratch: record a sound with a voice recorder, or create a beep with the tone generator.