[tweetmeme] OK, now for a random, non-digital strategy/social media/yada yada post. So you really want a portion of your favorite song turned into a ringtone for your iPhone, but 1) you don’t want to pay $.99  or 2) it isn’t a ringtone offered by ITunes. How do you do it?

1) Find your song on iTunes. The loop has to be super catchy, and it shouldn’t be more than 10 seconds long, so you don’t piss off your officemates/spouse/stranger in the subway. In this case, it’s Paper Planes, by MIA.

2) Listen to the song, and figure out the rough start times and end times of the loop.

3) Right-click on the song, and go to “get info”.

4) Get to the “options” tab, and find the “start” and “stop” times. You can refine the times by .25 of a second, so it takes a little bit of trial and error, you can get the loop perfectly. Note that when it shows up as a ringtone, it keeps on looping when the phone is actually ringing.

5) Now click save. Don’t worry, you can change it back in a sec.

6) Right click the modified song, and go to the option “convert to AAC”.

7) Now it has created a duplicate song, shortened and in AAC format. Find it in your iTunes by sorting by “date added”.

8 ) Drag and drop that song into your desktop.

9) This song is in .m4a format. You want to simply click on it and rename the extension to .m4r. It will ask you to verify that you want to change the extension. Yes, you do.

10) Now, click on this little .m4r file. It will automagically copy and add it into your “ringtones”.

11) Delete the file on your desktop, and revert the start and stop times on your original iTunes file.

12) You are done! Just configure your iPhone to add all ringtones, and choose it on your phone.

Currently, Cameron has Eazy-E, Elevators by Outkast, and Apache by Sugar Hill Gang. Chris has Intergalactic by Beastie Boys. Eddy is rocking Shaun Boothe – Poor Boy Remix.

What songs are YOU putting as your ringtone?