Macenstein

One of the side effects of playing a particularly addictive iPhone game is that quite often you find the soundtrack running through your head at night as you try to sleep, almost BEGGING to be used to make the world’s most annoying ringtone. But how to go about it? Sure, you could try to record the sound into your Mac via the audio jack as you play, but odds are that music will also come along with some extra bleeps and bloops from the game and you jump, shoot, etc. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just get at the raw music files? And what ABOUT those bleeps and bloops? Wouldn’t those make kick-ass text-alert sounds? Well it turns out you can grab those files, and it’s pretty easy. Here’s how.

Step One: Find the game you want to grab files from by right-clicking (option clicking) in iTunes and choose SHOW IN FINDER.

This will open up a finder window with the game highlit.

Step Two: Right-click on the file and choose DUPLICATE. This way we don’t accidentally screw up your original app.

Step Three: Rename your copy by changing the copy’s file extension from “.ipa” to “.zip”. (Optionally, you can drag your copy to your desktop or somewhere outside your app folder to avoid confusion).

Step Four: Right click on the new ZIP file, and choose to open it (basically you are unzipping it).

You should now see a folder

Step Five: Open that folder. Inside you should see a few files. Open up the PAYLOAD folder.

Step Six: There’s probably only 1 file in there.

Right-click that and choose SHOW PACKAGE CONTENTS.

This file is really just a fancily-wrapped folder, and choosing to show package contents just shows you all the files inside that folder.

Step Seven: Well, you’re basically done, as the files you want are in this folder. Just sort the Finder window BY KIND, and look for the music, sound, graphic, or movie file you want.

Step Eight: Now, if you are looking to grab a music file, odds are it is in the .caf file format, and iTunes cannot play it.

However, QuickTime CAN. So right-click that file and choose OPEN WITH and choose QUICKTIME.

Now you can export that file as a .M4A file. If it’s short enough you can take that “.m4a” file and change the extension to “.m4r” and just drag it into itunes to use it as a ringtone. If it’s longer than 40 seconds, or you only want a specific part of the song, you’ll need a 3rd party ringtone-making utility.

FYI, for creating ringtones, I use the apps Ringer ($3.99) , and iRingtones ($1.99) available in the Mac App Store. It’s fairly straight forward so I won’t go into a full tutorial on it here.

So there you go. You can now make unique ringtones, Text Alert sounds and more that will remind you of your favorite iOS games and annoy everyone around you.