Custom Ringtones have not seen much love from Apple over the last few releases of macOS and iOS. Now, with iTunes replaced in macOS Catalina, there is no clear cut way to figure out the various syncing options for custom ringtones. In this short guide, we will explore how you can still transfer your own custom ringtones and use them on your iPhone in iOS 13.
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No ‘Tones’ section in the Finder App on macOS Catalina
Since iTunes has been replaced in macOS Catalina with the new Music app and sync features in the Finder app, the process of moving custom ringtones from your Mac to iPhone has become difficult.
The new Sync feature in the Finder App does not have a section for ‘Tones’.
Furthermore, when you explore the library files for music, there is no ‘Tones’ folder anymore.
You can browse your Music and iTunes libraries on macOS Catalina by following these steps:
- Open Finder App on your MacBook
- Click on ‘Go’ at the top and choose ‘Go To Folder..’
- Type ‘~/Music’ without the quotes to open the Music library on your Mac
- Your GarageBand, iTunes and Music folders are located here.
If you use multiple iTunes libraries, be mindful that Apple recently provided a white paper in which they called out that multiple iTunes libraries are not currently supported in beta versions of macOS Catalina but the feature will be added later.
We have tried moving the custom ringtone from GarageBand on our Mac to the folders here but we were not successful in syncing it with the iPhone.
The old process of dragging a custom ringtone and dropping it to the iPhone in iTunes didn’t seem to work for us anymore. We are hopeful Apple will add functionality to do this very soon.
How to Transfer Custom Ring tones from your macOS Catalina
The workaround that we used in order to transfer custom ringtones out of MacBook to iPhone is by leveraging the iCloud drive / Files app option along with GarageBand app for iOS. GarageBand app has been enabled to use iCloud in settings.
The basic idea is to share the custom ringtone from your MacBook with your iPhone running GarageBand. Once it is available in iOS GarageBand, we export it as Ringtone to the iPhone’s contact app.
Lets’ get started and put a little elbow grease to this workaround!
Send the custom ringtone file (.m4a , .m4r) from your MacBook to yourself via email or use the Finder app on your MacBook.
Please follow the steps below to transfer these custom ringtones onto your iPhone running iOS 13.
- Tap on the ringtone attachment from your email
- Tap on the Share icon at the bottom left of your screen
- Choose ‘Save to Files’
- Move the downloaded ringtone into the folder ‘GarageBand File Transfer’
- Move the ringtone to GarageBand on iOS folder on your iPhone.
- Next, Open GarageBand App on your iPhone and tap on the ‘+’ icon
- On the next screen, choose ‘Audio Recorder’ as the Tracks type
- Tap on Tracks at the top of your screen
- Next, Tap on the loop icon at the top right corner of your screen
- The ringtone that you moved earlier via Files is now available here.
- Touch and hold the ring tone and drag it as a track
- Your Ringtone is imported in as a track
- Tap on the downward arrow icon and select ‘My Songs’
- Your ringtone is saved automatically as ‘My Song’
- Tap on Select and then choose ‘My Song’
- Choose ‘Share’ from the options
- Here tap on ‘Ringtone’ and then choose ‘Export’
- Select ‘Use Sound as..’ and choose the type of ringtone you would like and tap Done
- Choose between standard Ringtone, Text or assign directly to Contact here.
- Your Ringtone is now exported and you can access it from your Contacts App
How to Assign custom Ringtone to a Contact in iOS 13
This process has not changed in iOS 13. Open your Contacts app on your iPhone and select the contact that you want the new custom ringtone to be assigned to.
- Tap on ‘Edit’
- Scroll down to ‘Ringtone’ and tap there
- Choose the custom ringtone that you exported from GarageBand
- Tap on ‘Done’ at the top right corner of the screen
You can also use this process to change the default ‘text tone’ of any contact on your iPhone.
Tip: If you are working to create your own custom ringtones in Garage Band on macOS Catalina, when you are ready to export the ringtone project out of macOS Catalina, click on Share > Project to GarageBand for iOS and the ring tone will be readily available on your iPhone when you open up GarageBand.
We hope that this step by step workaround was helpful to you. Although this process works great in transferring out custom ringtones from macOS Catalina or the ones you download from the web, it is probably not the ideal solution when it comes to transferring a batch full of custom ringtones.
Feel free to chime in with some of your favorite tips and tricks when it comes to transferring or syncing custom ringtones from your MacBook.
Obsessed with tech since the early arrival of A/UX on Apple, Sudz (SK) is responsible for the editorial direction of AppleToolBox. He is based out of Los Angeles, CA.
Sudz specializes in covering all things macOS, having reviewed dozens of OS X and macOS developments over the years.
In a former life, Sudz worked helping Fortune 100 companies with their technology and business transformation aspirations.
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Excellent, thanks!
Just drag and drop into the Finder window doesn’t work for me, the songs (m4r) don’t appear in ringtones in my iPhone.
All you have to do is connect your iPhone/iPad to your Mac, open Finder, select your iPhone/iPad, then drag-and-drop ringtone files into the Finder window and they appear in your ringtones.
This was incredibly helpful. Thank you.
Actually I found out that if you have access to an .m4r file, you can just drag it onto the iTunes finder window and it’ll show up in the Tones section on your iPhone
Just drag and drop m4r file into the phone’s finder window (header section with your phone name) and click apply. It seems nothing happened but you can see ring is added when you check your phone.
Thx Thx Thx …. !!!!!!!