From an old phone to a new one
Somewhere on an old memory card there may be a clip you love: your child's first song, a friend's laugh, the sound of a festival in 2008. With this page you can carry that moment from your old phone to your iPhone as a ringtone. When you convert 3GP to M4R, the sound is extracted, cut to a ringtone length and saved as AAC audio with the .m4r extension that iOS uses for tones.
Rules for iPhone ringtones
- Maximum 40 seconds. iOS refuses longer ringtones. The tool cuts the sound to 40 seconds from your chosen start.
- AAC audio inside. The AMR or AAC sound from the 3GP is decoded by the built-in converter engine and encoded as AAC.
- Any length up to 40 seconds works. Text tones are usually much shorter, 2 to 5 seconds.
Making old phone sound work as a ringtone
Older phones recorded with AMR, a speech codec with a narrow frequency range. Voices are clear, but music sounds thin, similar to a phone call. As a ringtone this is often charming, and it is how the moment really sounded. Choose a part with a clear voice or a strong rhythm, and avoid quiet passages, because an iPhone speaker in a bag needs a loud start to be heard.
Putting the ringtone on your iPhone
- Connect the iPhone to your computer with a cable and trust the computer if asked.
- Mac: open Finder and click the iPhone in the sidebar. Windows: open iTunes or the Apple Devices app.
- Drag the .m4r file onto the iPhone window.
- On the iPhone, open Settings, then Sounds and Haptics, then Ringtone, and pick the new tone. You can also give it to a single contact.
Privacy and other options
The clip is processed in your browser and not uploaded, which matters for private family recordings. If you want the full recording for listening, save it with 3GP to M4A. To keep the video too, convert it with 3GP to MP4.