Custom iPhone Ringtone Installation
When I got my iPhone I was pretty pissed about Apple's arrogance in locking down ringtone usage. I'm not aware of any other phone making restrictions on ringtones, so WTF is Apple's excuse to blame this on copyright issues from the music labels. Heck, I've bought the music already let me use it - for personal use at least - as I see fit. But it's not just a matter of 'rights' - I own the ringtones I wanted to get on my phone. The music I use I've written and recorded and all I want is use it on the phone. In this case the whole copyright issue certainly doesn't hold.
During my original post people were nice enough to make suggestions for jailbreaking the iPhone and in the end that's what I ended up doing. After doing a bit of research and checking out various options I ended up - as suggested - jailbreaking the phone and opening it up to third party applications as well as getting full access to the iPhone file system.
That didn't immediately solve the ringtones problem but it did allow for some cool and useful applications to be installed on the phone.
As to the ringtones a little more work is required and here's a quick summary of what I did to get my custom music into the iPhone as ring tones from a Windows box.
JailBreaking the iPhone
The first thing to do is jailbreak the phone. This basically unlocks the phone and allows installation of third party software by providing an installer interface that can be used to put additional software on the phone. There are a number of different tools available to perform this task with varying levels of manual intervention.
After a bit of research I used ZiPhone, which is as easy to use as you can imagine. The tool unlocks the phone, jail breaks and if you trying to get the phone to work on another network can activate the phone without going to AT&T first.
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