With this simple article, find out how to turn fun or geeky Youtube videos into a free, fun ringtones. Whether it’s the Mega Man 2 or Sanford and Son, if it’s on Youtube, this will get it on your phone.

No signups, no giving out your email, and best of all, no paying for ringtones. So connect your phone to your computer, browse to Youtube, and get ready to customize your phone’s sounds, How-To Geek style.

Converting Youtube to MP3

This video on Youtube claimed to have a download of the Metal Gear codec sound in MP3 format—it didn’t.

For those of you unfamiliar with this sound, here’s an embed. It should make a fine addition to either phone’s sound profile.

Since we can’t download it, and we don’t really want to pay for it, we’ll strip it from the video using an online service, and get the ringtone the How-To Geek way!

Copy the URL of any Youtube video to your clipboard.

Video2mp3.net is full of obtrusive ads and popups, but is otherwise a great service.

(Author’s Note: This is hardly the only service like this. Feel free to leave your favorite Youtube to Audio websites in the comments!)

Paste the URL into the text input bar as shown above, choose standard quality, and click “Convert.”

You will have to sit through a few seconds of conversion and maybe an obtrusive popup advertisement. Stay the course! You’ll soon see the above link that will take you to another page where you can download your MP3 audio.

Your MP3 will download in a few seconds. You’ll find that it will have the same title as the Youtube video—you may want to rename it if it is terribly long, like this one. For the purposes of this example, we won’t be doing that.

Edit and Trim Your Youtube Audio

For those of you that only want a small segment of your Youtube MP3 may have to trim and edit it. Audacity is great open source freeware for editing sound files, and a favorite of How-To Geek author Yatri Trivedi.

Check out Yatri’s guide to basic audio editing in Audacity, as well as how to add MP3 saving functionality to Audacity. With these how-tos and this great freeware, you can create your own perfect ringtones, not only from your favorite Youtube video, but also from your other MP3s, as well.

• Download Audacity
• The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics
• How To Add MP3 Support to Audacity (to Save in MP3 Format)

Create an Android Ringtone from Your Youtube MP3

Getting your Android phone to use your Youtube MP3 as a ringtone is very easy. Android will recognize virtually any sound file as a valid ringtone, so MP3 works straight out of the box, no conversion to a “ringtone file.”

Start by connecting your phone to your PC. You then create a “Ringtones” folder in your root directory of your SD card—that is, if you don’t already have one there.

When you create or find this folder, simply drop in the converted Youtube.mp3, or any MP3 into the folder.

This HTC Evo Shift took a few extra moments to add the Metal Gear sound to the list of ringtones, but it finally did. You can change the ringtone under the “Sound and Notifications” item in the settings menu.

Create an iPhone Ringtone From Your Youtube MP3

Apple phones are slightly more complicated as they only use recognize M4R files as ringtones. Since iPhone users are very likely to have iTunes, let’s create our ringtone using only iTunes. Start by finding or adding your Youtube MP3 to iTunes.

Right click on the ringtone MP3 in your iTunes browser and select “Create Apple Lossless Version.”

After a moment, iTunes will have created a duplicate version, this one in M4A format.

Right click this new one, and choose “Show in Windows Explorer.”

You’ll be taken to the where that file lives on your hard drive. Rename the file, changing the extension from M4A to M4R.

If you don’t have file extensions visible, you can see how to make them visible the official Microsoft sanctioned way.

If prompted, you’ll need to click Yes to change the filename.

And now your M4A is an iTunes and iPhone recognized ringtone! Double click it to add it to iTunes.

You can find it under the “Ringtones” tab of your library.

And in order to add it to your iPhone ringtones, you have to connect the phone and browse in iTunes for the ringtones synced to the device. Select “Sync Ringtones” as shown above, and pick the ringtones you want to add to the phone, and click apply.

Change to your new ringtone through Settings > Sounds > Ringtone. Now you can finally say goodbye to those default Apple ringtones!

Image Credit: Ring, Ring, Hello by Julia Roy, available under Creative Commons.