It’s easy…

1. Make a short MP3 file by ’snipping’ out the section that you want to use as your ringtone. I use an old copy of TotalRecorder
2. Convert the short MP3 to to AAC. You can do this in iTunes if you set your Preferences | General | Import Settings to AAC Encoder, add the short MP3 to your iTunes library, and then right-click on the MP3 and select Convert to AAC
3. Use Get Info to find the .m4a file that iTunes creates (it puts them in silly places) and change the extension from .m4a to .m4r
4. Copy the .m4r file into /Library/Ringtones on your iPhone using ssh/scp.
5. If it’s not loud enough, you can use mpTrim to pump up the volume of the MP3 a bit and then re-encode, etc…

I found these basic instructions very helpful in figuring this out.

Using iTunes to convert to AAC is a bit of a pain — does anyone know of a good standalone MP3->AAC converter?

Update: notes here on how to do custom SMS tones and such…

How did I know this was going to happen? Thx for the link Liz!

Anthony blogged this: As always, ignorance no obstacle to righteousness in California (the headline is mine, btw).

I was channel-surfing a bit last night and in between Rock of Love and Extreme Engineering I saw “Ghetto TV”. How. Could. I. Not. Click. On. Ghetto TV??? This was on local cable access (channel 29, I think) and I gotta say I can totallly dig it. Hard to find much on the internet, but check out Ghetto TV on MySpace.

I must be a haxx0r now. I managed to brick my iPhone yesterday after installing some stuff, so I had to restore it from scratch. Once it was restored, I jailbroke it again with ZiPhone, and went to install BSD & ssh again, but those apps aren’t listed anywhere in the package lists. I tried updating the URL of “Ste Packaging” (site) to http://repo.smxy.org/iphone-apps/ as detailed here, and also added http://ride4.org/shai.xml as a new source as noted here – that source links to a ton of other sources, and so I was hoping that it would make the BSD package available again.

No dice. No BSD package. It seems some others are having the same problem. What gives?

I found a couple of references to Cydia Package Manager and the “Fake BSD Subsystem”… Installed Cydia… And Mobileterminal… And I’m in. Nice.

One thing that really bugs about the basic Installer.app is that you have no way of knowing which category a package is in, so if someone says “install openssh”, you have to poke around through all the categories in the hopes of finding it. Cydia has a search button – awesome!