James Delahunty
8 Sep 2007 19:49
When Apple Inc. announced support to create custom ringtones for the iPhone using iTunes this week, the company was referring literally only to songs from the iTunes music store. An update that the company put out attempted to block users from using free custom ringtones and syncing them with an iPhone. However, it wasn't long until a workaround was found (convert free audio clip to AAC, rename to .m4r and play with iTunes).
However, users reported that after installing the iTunes 7.4.1 update, this workaround no longer worked, meaning Apple deliberately has tried to block it. A post on Engadget however, showed that after repeating the older steps like before, and renaming the .m4r file to .m4a, when plugging in an iPhone the file will be added to your syncable ringtones list without an error message it had been showing before.
Getting ringtones from the iTunes store costs 99c.
Source:
Yahoo (Macworld)