Make a ringtone in GarageBand
Easily turn your favourite tune into a ringtone using GarageBand
How to turn your favourite tune into an iPhone ringtone with GarageBand
GarageBand isn’t just for people who want to record music: it’s a handy app for making ringtones too. Making a new tone is really simple. All you need to do is choose the audio you want to use, cut it down to size and export it to iTunes. (Technically it should be a track you own the copyright for, but nobody’s ever been arrested for making their favourite song into a ringtone.) As you’ll see, the process is really quick and straightforward. You can also compose your own ringtones using Apple Loops, GarageBand’s Smart Instruments, or any real musical instruments you have handy.
The trick to making loops is to take advantage of GarageBand’s selection looping. If you click the icon that looks a bit like a recycling symbol, whenever you press the Play button GarageBand will repeat the section indicated by the orange marker above the audio tracks – so if you want an eight-bar loop, simply adjust the selection to eight bars. That makes it easy to hear how your ringtone will sound, and to identify whether you need to do any more tweaking to it.
In this tutorial we’ve used a track that’s easy to loop, but not all music is so simple: you might find that to get your audio to loop perfectly, you need to edit it in a bit more detail. You might need the audio to start a fraction of a second earlier or later, for example, so it’ll loop nice and smoothly. That isn’t a problem: zoom in, then drag the audio forwards or backwards by tiny amounts. Gary Marshall