MP3 to M4R
Your music never leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make this work. Every other site offering this wants your file on their server first — for a trim and a rename.
The usual one, and the part that matters is the length.
Your MP3 is decoded, the window you choose is cut out of it, and that is encoded as AAC into an MP4 named .m4r. It is a second generation of lossy encoding, which for forty seconds through a phone speaker is not something anybody will hear. The length is what matters: over forty seconds and iTunes simply will not take it.
An .m4r is an .m4a with a different name
That is the whole of it. An .m4r is an MP4
container holding AAC audio — byte for byte the same kind of
file as an .m4a. iTunes uses the extension, and nothing else,
to decide that a file belongs in the ringtone list rather than the music
library. Any site charging you for “m4r conversion” is charging
for a rename, and usually taking a copy of your music on the way
through.
The forty-second rule, which is the real reason this page exists
A ringtone may be no longer than 40 seconds
and a text tone no longer than 30. Hand iTunes a
four-minute .m4r and it will not sync it — and it
generally says nothing useful about why, which is how people conclude the
conversion failed when the file was perfectly good.
That limit is iTunes's, not the file format's. An
.m4r of any length is a valid MP4; it is Apple's tone-creation
limit that stops at forty. So this page trims, tells you it has trimmed,
and lets you choose where the window starts rather than always taking the
opening.
It also fades fifteen milliseconds at each end. Cutting a waveform part-way up steps the speaker cone instantly, and that step is a click — on a ringtone, a click you would hear every time the phone rang. Fifteen milliseconds is too short to notice as a fade and long enough to remove it.
Getting it onto the phone
Connect the phone to a Mac or a PC and drag the
.m4r onto it — in the Finder the phone appears in the
sidebar, in iTunes on Windows it appears in the toolbar. The tone then
shows up under Settings › Sounds & Haptics on the phone.
A ringtone cannot be installed from the phone by itself, other than through GarageBand. That is Apple's restriction and no converter, this one included, can get round it — anything claiming otherwise is describing GarageBand or asking you to install a profile. If it will not sync, check the length first.
What it will not do
It will not make an Android ringtone, because Android does not need one: an Android phone plays an ordinary MP3 dropped into its Ringtones folder, so the conversion does not exist. It will not strip DRM — a song bought from the iTunes Store before 2009, or anything downloaded from a subscription service, is encrypted and this page will say so rather than produce noise.
And it will not tell you whether you have the right to use a particular recording as a ringtone. That is between you and whoever owns it.
Where to go next
- WAV to M4R — from uncompressed, and usually a recording rather than a song
- M4A to M4R — from already an MP4 of AAC, which is what a ringtone is
- MP3 to M4A — the same file without the ringtone trim