How Do I Make a MP3 Ringtone in Garageband?

So you got this awesome song in your iTunes music library, and you would like to use the very best part of it as a ringtone on you mobile phone? Well it’s not as tough as you might think!

Once again this tip is mostly written for people that have bought a themselves a new Macbook (or any other Mac model with bluetooth), or just want to easily make ringtones for use on your mobile phone.

You will need:
A Mac with bluetooth
A mobile phone with bluetooth, that supports .mp3 ringtones. Not the iPhone.
iLife 08 (if you have the 06 version, some of the instructions might not be able to follow, but i believe it can be accomplished with the 06 version as well)

The first step is to find a song you love from your iTunes music library. It could be just about any song, and it doesn’t matter if its archived as a .mp3 or .acc file.

Now starts the magic! Launch Garageband, and leave iTunes open, we are coming back to it later. After launching Garageband, the welcome screen shows up, choose “Create New Music Project”. Then give it a name (for instance “Ringtone”wink and press the “create” button.

So now we got Garageband up and running with our new project open. By default, what you will see on the screen is a virtual keyboard that you can play on (real fun, try it out some day!) and a track that is called “Grand Piano” marked in green.

First thing that we are going to do in Garageband is to get rid of the “Grand Piano” track. To do so, click on the menu “track > delete track”, or simply press the shortcut “command + backspace”.

Now you are ready for doing the trick. Open up iTunes, and simply drag the track from the iTunes window, to just about anywhere in the Garageband window (don’t close the iTunes window yet, we need it for later, minimize it). And there you go, the tune is copied from iTunes to Garageband for further editing! Your tune (the orange bar in the track named after your tune) probably isn’t at the place where you want it to be. Again use the Mac drag-n-drog simplicity, and place it where you want it (for me, thats at point zero on the ruler). Now you wanna hit the play button to make sure that it’s the right track that you imported, and also for making a last decision about where to “cut” the track.

So now what you wanna do is to fit the tune to the Garageband window, so you can se the whole tune at once. To do so, drag the slider at the bottom left corner of the screen to the left, till the tune fits into the window. Now click the menu “track > show arrange track”. This will open up a little bar just on top of your track. Now press the darkgrey plus symbol three times. By doing so you are splitting you tune up into 3 sections (untitled, untitled 1, untitled 2). You can rename these by double clicking on the name of one of the sections, and wait a tiny second, i renamed mine “cut” “tune” and “cut”.

As some of you probably guessed just before, these 3 sections are going to help us cut out our favorite part of the song. The most important section is the “tune” one. It’s gonna mark up the part of the song that we want as our final ringtone. Expand it, or make it smaller, by dragging at the left and right borders of the section. Next, cover up the rest of the track with the 2 “cut” sections, by expanding those the same way as you did with the “tune” section before.

Now click on the first “cut” section, and press backspace, that will delete the music in the section, by pressing backspace again, you delete the section completely. Do the same trick on the other “cut” section. Now press menu “share > send song to iTunes”. There will pop up a little window with forms that are already filled. Now make sure that the “Compress using:” is set to “MP3 Encoder”. Then press share.

So we are back in iTunes again, and the song will automatically start playing. This places us near at the end, since the only thing we are left to do is connect to the mobile phone, and transfer the file. Now make sure that bluetooth is running on the mobile phone, and that it’s near you.

Go open up system preferences. Under hardware, press bluetooth. Make sure that both “Bluetooth Power” and “Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar” is checked. On the left you can see a list of your devices. If you have connected to you mobile phone before it’s already there, if not press the “plus” button and the “Bluetooth Setup Assistant” will help you through the process of connecting.

Now click on the bluetooth icon, and mouse over the name of you phone. Then press “send archive”. Now type in the name of your tune (including .mp3 after the name to make the search more precise). Now click it and press the “send” button and you are done! When the transfer is complete, make sure to turn bluetooth off (unless needed) on both you Mac and your phone so that you don’t waste precious battery smile.

Have you found a great way to bring home-made ringtones to your phone? Share it with us in the Comments section below!

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Your Comments:

For those of you who are unable to drag your music into iTunes, try changing the extension (works for me) from .MP3 to .mp3.

Apparently GarageBand can only recognized the file format in small letters .

 Perlyn
 02/06/2009  at  07:47 PM

I, too, am getting some blank at the end of the song. It would be nice to be able to prevent or remove this.

 Marion
 02/21/2009  at  12:08 PM

My Garage band had different options, so I just chose the section of the song with a few clicks of my mouse, and then exported as suggested. Also, my phone did not like the file types out of garageband, so.. I used a free software solution called Mpeg streamclip to export/convert the files to 3G or somesuch, and then voila! Your article was the basis of my ability to figure thisone out, thanks!!!

 K H
 03/18/2009  at  11:12 PM

after i make my song, i go to share in my garage band and it isnt giving me the option to "send ringtone to itunes" it only says send song to itunes. please help

 kayla
 05/10/2009  at  09:56 PM

Does anyone know why i cannot send this file to my voyager phone

 Dominic
 05/12/2009  at  08:49 PM

THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH!! Your step-by-step worked perfect with my iMac and Motorola Z3 phone. Greatly appreciate.

 LATINFOX
 05/15/2009  at  11:25 PM

This was very easy. Thanks.

 dk
 07/25/2009  at  07:36 PM

Worked like a charm! I love my new ringtone!

 Liz
 11/04/2009  at  05:24 PM

The song is sent to my music instead of my ringtones? How can i convert that on my phone?

 Josh W
 12/09/2009  at  02:25 PM

Wow! Thank you so much for posting these very user-friendly instructions. I am not that tech-savy and even I was able to figure it out! The only thing that did not work for me was after I connected my phone to my computer via bluetooth, I could not send the file. It said that my phone did not support the mechanism.

However, I use Verizon (I have an LG Dare) so I was able to send the mp3 via email/text. I was able to send a text message to myself via my email account by sending the file to: (your nine-digit phone # w/o any spaces)

 Mel C
 01/05/2010  at  11:21 PM

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