Who wants custom ringtones on Mango right now?

I just recently procured a Windows Phone for a project that I am going to be starting up.  And well I’m really loving it so far.  I do miss a couple of items from the Apple ecosystem but I’ll leave that for another post when I can get around to it.

Now for the topic at hand, custom ringtones.  If you are an early adopter and are on Mango there is a few simple steps to getting custom ringtones on your phone.  Background I had several ringtones that I made for my iPhone 4 that are in the .m4r format.  I used an awesome and might I add free audio tool called Audacity. 

First things first go download Audacity I went with the new beta but you should be fine with the current release.  Then you’ll need the FFmpeg import/export library plugin. 

There are a few restrictions to the ringtone files:

• 39 seconds or shorter
• smaller than 1 megabyte (MB)
• saved in MP3 or WMA format
• not copy-protected (i.e. DRM free)

I fired up Audacity and opened up one of the .m4r files to convert and set the Project Rate to 16000 Hz to keep the file size under 1mb:

Then you click File –> Export and select WMA:

I converted a couple of my iPhone ringtones that were in .m4r to .wma files as shown here:

So now you fire up your beta version of the Zune desktop app and go to your Collections and you can drag and drop the newly created .wma ringtones that you created into your collection.  Now you Edit each file and create a new Genre for it titled Ringtone.

Now sync up your phone and drag your new ringtones to your phone:

And there you have it, custom ringtones for your Windows Phone on Mango.  Enjoy!