A familiar sound on a new phone
The ringtone of your first mobile phone can bring back strong memories. If it lived on an old Samsung or another feature phone as an .mmf file, you can bring it to an iPhone. To convert MMF to M4R, the converter decodes the recorded audio in the file and saves it as AAC with the M4R extension that iPhone needs for ringtones.
Will my ringtone work?
That depends on what is inside the file:
- Recorded tones (voices, effects, recorded music clips) convert well.
- Synthesized melody tones, made of notes for the phone's chip, contain no recording and cannot be converted here.
For a synthesized favourite, there is a workaround if the old phone still works: play the tone and record it with the Audio Recorder, holding the phone close to the microphone in a quiet room. Then turn the recording into a ringtone with the iPhone ringtone maker.
Length, level and quality
iPhone ringtones must be 40 seconds or shorter. Most old tones already are, but long recorded clips may need trimming. A short tone loops automatically while the phone rings.
Old phone audio is often quiet compared with modern tones, so Normalize the file first. For bitrate, 64–96 kbps AAC captures everything the source has; the iPhone speaker will reveal the narrow, lo-fi sound of the original, which is part of its charm.
Installing the tone
- On a Mac: connect the iPhone, select it in Finder and drag the .m4r file onto it.
- On Windows: in iTunes or Apple Devices, drop the file into the Tones section of the phone.
- On the iPhone alone: save it to Files, open it in GarageBand and share it as a ringtone.
Then select it under Settings, Sounds and Haptics. If it does not appear, check that the file is under 40 seconds and ends in .m4r.