Installing Ringtones on my iPhone with Windows XP and iTunes

I wanted to install homemade ringtones onto my iPhone like the ones I had previously created for my Sony Ericsson.  For example, when my wife or father calls, I have ringtones which either say, "Debbie is calling" or "Dad is calling."  This way I can tell who is calling without looking at the phone.  After searching the internet, I found a clue about how to do this on the wired.com site.  The instructions on the site at least let me know it was possible, although there were several details missing which I'll elaborate on here to hopefully help others.

First I created the ringtones using Microsoft's Sound Recorder application which comes with Windows.

With Sound Recorder I created the files I wanted such as "Debbie is calling.wav"

The next step was to drag the wav files to iTunes (version 7.4.1.2), which added the files to the iTunes library.

iTunes put the files in the "Unknown Artist\Unknown Album" folder.

The next step was to right click on the wav files in iTunes and select "Convert Selection to AAC."

iTunes then created and added a ".m4a" format of the files in the folder.

In the next step, I created the folder "Ringtones" in my iTunes directory and copied the ".m4a" files there and then changed the extension to ".m4r"

The next step was to drag the files from the "Ringtones" folder to the "Ringtones" Library in iTunes.  You would think you are done at this point, but you are not.  The new ringtones won't sync with the iPhone until after the next steps.

Now that the files are in the iTunes "Ringtones" Library, go back to the "Ringtones" folder and change the file extension back to ".m4a"

Now go back to the iTunes "Ringtones" Library, right click on the ringtone, and select "Get Info"

iTunes will respond with "File could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"  Click on "Yes."

Then select the ".m4a" file in the iTunes Ringtones directory.

The next step is to sync your iPhone with iTunes.

The ringtones are now on the iPhone.

Mission complete!