So I was in iTunes poking around in the iTunes Store when I glanced at my source list and noticed a happy little bell icon. Hmm, that wasn’t there before. I made note of the fact that I haven’t seen anything in my install of iTunes 7.4 regarding this feature until now, and the iTunes Ringtones page on Apple’s site shed the “Coming soon” tag it had, so I can only assume it was just activated tonight. [UPDATE: Yup!] So here it is, ladies and gentlemen, the first test drive of iTunes ringtones for iPhone!

In order to create a ringtone, I had to download a song from the iTunes Store, being that none of the songs I’ve purchased off iTunes in the past support ringtones. I settled on Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams for this lovely test. That’s right, I plunked down a whole 99 cents in the name of you, our readers. I hope you’re grateful.

UPDATE: This morning I tried the ringtone tool again. iTunes asked me to enter my Apple ID and password again, and this time it added a bunch of little bells to my iTunes library.

Oh, and it’s a pretty good song to boot.

Creating a ringtone is actually very easy, as Steve Jobs demonstrated in his presentation last week. All I had to do was highlight the song, right-click it, and select “Create Ringtone” from the menu (alternately, you can select this command from the Store menu). At this point, I was prompted to enter my Apple ID and password, then told to read the iTunes ringtones terms of service. Interestingly enough, the terms of service include the same stipulations as any other Fairplay-protected content, though this one had me confused:

You shall be authorized to use the Products [ringtones] on five Apple-authorized devices at any time.

Mind you, the terms of service do not define what these “devices” are. Can I only use it on five iPhones, or is it like songs purchased from iTunes where they can be played on any five machines and an unlimited number of iPods (or iPhones, in this case)? Upon further review, I think that the terms of service you are presented with are the terms of service for the entire store.

Now it’s down to the business of actually creating the ringtone. After accepting the terms of serive, I had to select “Create RIngtone” again since iTunes closed the ringtone editor pane on me. It took a few moments for the ringtone editor to load completely; it appears iTunes has to access the music store and fetch the song again before allowing you to create the ringtone (never mind the fact that I already downloaded the song, so why iTunes can’t base it off of what I already downloaded is beyond me).

Okay, it just asked me to log in again. This is not going as smoothly as I had hoped. And now it closed the ringtone editor pane again, requiring me to open it one more time. I can only hope this is first-run jitters!

Third time’s a charm. I can now create the ringtone. Actually creating the ringtone is braindead simple. The portion of the song selected for the use as a ringtone is highlighted in blue. To edit the ringtone, all you need to do is drag the blue field to the part of the song you want to use. There are drag thumbs at both the beginning and end of the blue field for adjusting the length of the ringtone (you can make them up to 30 seconds long). There are also checkboxes giving you the option to fade in and fade out. Additionally, you can specify how much of a gap you want between “rings” when it is looping--the default is a half second-pause between rings. And of course, you can preview your ringtone before buying by clicking the appropriately-named “Preview” button. Don’t press the spacebar to preview, however; it’ll close the ringtone editor pane and play the entire song.

So there you have it; it’s pretty easy. I didn’t actually buy the ringtone since I don’t own an iPhone, but the opening riff to Boulevard of Broken Dreams is pretty catchy. There are a few quirks to work out of the system, as I noted above, and the selection needs help (oh, and the terms of service ambiguity), but aside from that, it’s a very easy-to-use service.