Good vibrations
Get a buzz from making your own kind of music produced in GarageBand
>>> Telling your iPhone or iPad apart when a notification sound plays can be challenging. But you can turn any project you’ve composed in the free GarageBand app into a new ringtone or useful alert sound.
Ringtones can be 40 seconds max. If longer, GarageBand will trim from the track’s start on export. At the Project Chooser, hold a finger on one and choose Share from the options bar when it appears. Choose Ringtone, set a name, then tap Export. In the confirmation pop–up, tap Use Sound As, or tap OK to finish; the tone is added to the list you can choose from in Settings > Sounds & Haptics later.
The Use Sound As option lets you set the tone as your new standard ringtone or standard text tone, also giving you the ability to assign it to a contact. For the latter, after you choose a contact, you can choose whether it’s used as a ringtone or text tone for them.
Want to use an existing track from the Music app? It’ll need not to have copy protection (DRM), but Apple hasn’t sold music with that since 2009 — however, bear in mind that songs downloaded as part of an Apple Music subscription are not DRM–free.
If creating your own ringtone is too much hassle, you may find a popular song or sound effect in Apple’s Tone Store, which you can access in Settings > Sounds & Haptics.
Create a new Audio Recorder project in GarageBand and set its length to fit that of the entire song: tap + (top right), then the current section and turn on Automatic. Switch to the Tracks view (tap the icon third in at the top left), then open the Loop Browser (top right). Tap Music and find the particular song you want. From here it’s possible to search by name or browse by album, artist, genre or playlist — whatever works best for you.
Drag the track into your project. Pinch/spread your fingers to zoom in/ out, drag the handles at the track’s ends to trim its length to the part you want, and drag the track so its left edge aligns with the beat on the ruler where you want it to start playing. Return to the Project Chooser and export as described earlier.