iPhone Ringtones and Fission from Rogue Amoeba - Updated

The existing process for adding ringtones to your iPhone is to buy a song from iTunes and then pay a ringtone encoder fee so each ringtone will cost you about two bucks. I might have gone along with it but none of the songs I've already bought from iTunes show up as being available for ringtone encoding. (If an iTunes song can be encoded, it will have a little bell next to it. I went through my entire song list and saw zero bells. Yes, the column was active in View.)

Now I'm not absolutely positive you need the Fission software to create a ringtone but here's what I did: I tried dragging an MP3 into the Ringtones window in iTunes and nothing happened. I didn't shrink it so it may have been rejected for length but there was no error message so I'm assuming it's something more devious than that.

This is where Fission comes into it. The software comes from Rogue Amoeba and this is the same outfit that created Nicecast so I'm well familiar with their quality. (Nicecast is the standard for audio streaming on a Mac)

Fission gets about four Phantasms as it's a little difficult to position the scissors to cut the audio clip but overall it's very easy to use. It writes the ringtone directly to iTunes so, if your iPhone is docked, it will immediately sync with the iPhone and you'll be able to use the new ringtone right away. All for $32 - Not bad.

So now which ringtones go with which person. Some are obvious as "Foreclosure" plays when the real estate agent calls up. Telia has always been "Starship Trooper" but I've also got one verse of the Silas version of "Wild Thang" in there. Decisions, decisions.

Update: You definitely can't drag an MP3 file into the Ringtones window of iTunes and expect anything to happen. The ringtones are all .M4R format and I don't know of anything for Mac other than Fission that will create them. (There are loads of different programs for Windows that will create ringtones for other types of phones but I don't know of one for iPhone)