I’ve recently picked up a few iPhone/iTunes tricks that I’d like to share with those of you that would like to do the following:

• Create custom ring tones using your own .MP3s
• Synchronize your iPhone with multiple iTunes Librarys (computers)

Creating Custom Ring Tones with iTunes only

Using the instructions in this article I can now take any DRM free music (MP3s) from my computer and convert them into perfect quality ring tones without paying iTunes $1. Not that I’m cheap or anything but it’s nice to be able to create ring tones from any song you’d like and not be limited to the few songs iTunes offers as ring tones.

In short what your doing is clipping the song down to 30 seconds or less, converting the .MP3 into iTune’s AAC format (.m4a) then renaming the file extension .m4r so iTunes recognizes the media as a ring tone. It’s really quite simple, and only takes a couple of minutes.

Synchronizing your iPhone with multiple iTunes Libraries/Computers

In my opinion this should be an option to any iPhone owner. I understand why Apple designed it this way, so you can’t just plug in your iPhone to any library and steal other peoples music, but what if you have 2 computers of your own, both sharing a library on an external HD on your own network? I’m sure there are a ton of other scenarios where people would want to synchronize their iPhones with multiple PCs and not lose the data from their device.

Thanks to this article I can now sync all my Contacts and iCal with my Macbook, while I control which music I want on my iPhone using my desktop PC. Basically I changed the library ID on my PC to match the library ID of my Macbook so iTunes thinks it’s the same library each time I synchronize. Just be careful with these steps, you could very easily mess things up.

Tags: iphone, itunes, synchronize