Hacker News Reader

Comment by royskee | Hacker News Reader

It's been a while since I've done it, but I think it's still possible, though a pain in the ass, to put custom ringtones on an iPhone. It involved renaming a .m4a audio file with to have a .m4r extension and then somehow getting it on the phone. Worth it to have the opening to "Eye of the Tiger" as a ringtone.

View on HN

"Eye of the Tiger" is a choice ringtone and I like the story of how it got to be famous, since 'another one bites the dust' didn't make the cut. So sad you have to go through hoops to get it on your phone. If there was 'justice' in this world, you would be able to ask Siri to set 'eye of the tiger' as your ringtone and that be accomplished with no difficulty.

In Android land we haven't got quite that ease of use, to my knowledge, however, I always set a song from my music library of MP3 files to be the ringtone, only changing this when I get a new phone every few years.

For me, a custom ringtone means it is my phone and not someone else's that is ringing. This means that I do answer, even if quite distracted, and this has been very helpful at times. I have tried a few songs over the years, and a relatively calm intro helps, so, to others, it sounds like music easing in rather than a ringtone. I can catch it before the bass drops.

I assume the grass is always greener in the land of Apple, but, it surprises me that they don't make custom ringtones easy. I thought Apple was for the creative types and the free thinkers that would care for such things.

Re the article, just thought I should share an intrusive thought: crazy frog had a p3nis. Once noticed, it cannot be unnoticed. :Shudder:

> I thought Apple was for the creative types and the free thinkers that would care for such things.

I always thought Apple was for people that thought customization and configuration should be avoided. Apple will pre-configure it in the optimal way and determine which things you should be allowed to do.

This has not been a true statement about Apple in more than a quarter century.

s/in the optimal way //

I also set a custom ringtone for the important people in my life. If my wife, kid or boss call me, I will know it by the sound. Super useful.

Yeah, I did that ages ago and it’s transferred along every time I get a new phone. I assume you could still do it again from a new file but haven’t tried it in a long time either. Also did it for an incoming text tone.

I did that a while ago, but it only works if you sync phone with iTunes and it was not working last time I tried.

I liked having ringtones for certain family members, as a parent I usually leave my ringtone on (because if my teen is giving me an actual phone call it’s usually something wrong with the car she is driving so it’s high stakes), but anywhere out with the family it’s on vibrate.

The upcoming major update to iOS 26 makes this something users can easily do with an MP3 or M4A audio file under 30 seconds long.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/17/ios-26-use-as-ringtone-...

You could make ring tones with garbage band?! Since 2013?!

Heh, I was just looking up stuff from the era and found the original discussion of same: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/new-itunes-how-to-add-r...

On Android I 'member having to set some special metadata (`ANDROID_LOOP=true`) to make it loop cleanly: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36906015

Not sure if this issue persists because I'm boring and am still using the same ringtone I made back in 2011 :v https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNSHhrYsudI

  gbsplay -qqq -o stdout "Gameboy Camera (1998)(Nintendo).gbs" 48 48 | \
  sox -t raw -r 88.2k -e signed -b 16 - -t wav - | \
  oggenc - -t "Trippy-H" -a "Hirokazu 'Hip' Tanaka" -l "Pocket Camera" -c "ANDROID_LOOP=true" -o Trippy-H.ogg

It works on Android without any special setting.

You can do it, I did it fairly recently with a phone I did a full wipe of.

You need to manually open the phone entry in iTunes and look for the tones category in there, and drag the files into it. You used to be able to put the tones directly into iTunes, but now it's a matter of dragging the files directly to the phone's tone category itself.

Yup, pain in the ass but quite possible. Check out this 100gecs ringtone I made as an example (warning — autoplay ringtone audio):

https://freezine.xyz/2/my-boys-got-his-own-ring-tone/index.h...

Meh. Bad Apple music box version. https://musicboxmaniacs.com/explore/melody/bad-apple-full-pl...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com