iPhone: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. Ringtones, Nike, & Talking Buttons

If you're baffled by the title of this chapter—why on earth are those three random features covered in a single chapter together?—you're forgiven. The answer is simple: All three are wicked cool features, each too short to justify a full chapter, and they didn't really fit anywhere else.

So, OK, you're right: this chapter is one big mishmash of miscellany. What were you expecting—Shakespeare?

Ringtones

The iPhone comes with 25 creative and intriguing ringing sounds, from an old car horn to a peppy marimba lick. But where's the fun in that? Surely you don't want to walk around listening to the same ringtones as the millions of other iPhone owners.

Fortunately, you can also make up custom ring sounds, either to use as your main iPhone ring (or incoming-text-messages sound) or to assign to individual callers in your Contacts list. This chapter covers the two official ways of going about it—carving 30-second ringtone snippets out of pop songs and recording your own in GarageBand on a Mac—and points you to the two sneakier ways.