iPhone Ringtone Store Now Live

Apple announced the sale of ringtones for the iPhone last week, and the online store that offers them is now live. You buy the ringtones through iTunes; a small icon appears next to the track in the music store showing you which tracks can be bought as ringtones. You'll pay 99 cents on top of the 99 cents you paid for the track.

If any of the songs you own (ones bought through iTunes only) can be purchased as ringtones, you'll see a small bell icon next to the track name in your library. Click on this, agree to the licencing agreement and it'll show you the waveform of the track with a 15-second blue bar that you can drag around to create the ringtone. You can stretch this out to a maximum of 30 seconds, and you can use any 30-second excerpt of the song as ringtone. Click on buy, Steve Jobs gets your 99 cents and you get the ringtone on your iPhone the next time you synch your iPhone.


It is pretty easy to do, and Apple has done a nice job of integrating it into iTunes. And the ability to use any 30 seconds of the song is good; most ringtones are pre-chosen sections, although longer ringtone options might have been nice. But the selection is limited, and given that it is so easy to hack your own ringtones, it isn't clear how many people are going to use this feature.