Music is an everyday part of my life. It helps me relax when I am stressed, or it simply entertains me. Because of my passion for music I owned a Sony Ericsson walkman series mobile phone and my music player played practically all day long. I always used my favorite songs as my ringtone and creating ring tones for my Sony Ericsson was easy. When I received the iPhone, I fell in love with the music quality and the memory capacity but one aspect that disappointed me was the ringtone options.

Apple sells ringtones through iTunes but you have to shell out US$2 for a ringtone (US$1 for a song and an extra $1 to convert that song into a ringtone). But of course hackers set out to find an easy way to create iPhone ringtones for free. Apple has attempted to block iPhone users from installing free ringtones on their devices and so they have been updating iTunes to fix the loopholes.

But despite Apple's best efforts, the classic game of cat and mouse still continues. Hackers come up with workarounds just hours after each patch is released. This chasing game is centered on desktop applications for installing custom ringtones.

Hackers noticed that the main difference between ringtones and regular audio files were their file extensions. The regular AAC audio files have file the extension .m4a whereas ringtones use the file extension .m4r.

In this article I’ll show you on how to create and import ringtones for your iPhone using a Windows based PC. We have tested three methods on Windows XP Professional and found that the ringtones we made work fine on iTunes 8.0.1 and above.

I will cover three methods:

1) Circumventing filenames with Windows Explorer and iTunes

2) Free Ringtone Maker application

3) Audiko.net