Tutorial for ALL iPhone/Mac users, free ringtones! =)

*Note: Any screenshots in my tutorials can always be clicked on in order to enlarge them.

A lot of Mac/iPhone users still ask me if there's a program they can download or purchase to make ringtones for their iPhone instead of using the built-in option in iTunes. For one, iTunes doesn't allow you to make ringtones out of EVERY song, and if you're like me, and all you're music isn't from iTunes, you'd have to buy the song again, not to mention pay to convert it to a ringtone. Lame.

Now I know there's software programs and jailbroken programs that have endless amounts of ringtones, but I'm also aware not EVERYONE jailbreaks.

Now keep in mind, this tutorial only works for Mac users, so sorry PC users (maybe it's time to make the switch, ha!) ;)

Mac users, you don't have to buy or download ANY additional software, it's built right in to your computer already; it's this nice little program called GarageBand, that pretty much comes standard on every Mac ever made.

The reason I like GarageBand so much is because you can mix it however you want. You have a lot more control. If you want to mesh different songs together, you can do that as well.

First open GarageBand, it will ask you to pick a template or whatever, select "New Project" - it doesn't matter what the heck you name it, I normally just keep song 1 or whatever it's defaulted to, and keep overwriting that file. You can change the name of the ringtone and Artist in iTunes once you import it into your ringtones tab.

Next, you want to open iTunes and find the song you want to make a ringtone out of and drag it into GarageBand.

The only thing you really have to familiar yourself with is Apple loops. Ringtones need to be under around 34-35 seconds for GarageBand to convert it to a ringtone, and it needs to be made with an Apple loop, which basically just selects a portion of the song to make a ringtone out of.

Alright, after you drag your song into GarageBand, you should see this (if GarageBand opened a virtual keyboard, just x it out). I also go to the counter and change it to time instead of measures (located on the bottom).



Now expand the view by clicking the tiny scissor icon in the bottom left hand corner of GarageBand (3rd icon from the left in the screenshot below):



Then you will see this:



This is where you will highlight areas that you want to cut out (if you choose to do this), otherwise you can just position an apple loop in order to select the part of the song you want to convert.

Now comes the Apple loop part, next to your play/pause/forward controls to the right, you should see this button:



Go ahead, don't be scared, click it! Now look at the top of garage band, you should now see a yellow bar that looks like this:



You can adjust the length of this bar, and slide it back and forth.

For example, say you just want the chorus of a specific song, just drag this bar to the chorus part, adjust it accordingly, and you'd be done (unless you want to add things like fade outs and what-not - if someone would like a more detailed, in-depth tutorial of GarageBand that goes into great detail about editing, splicing, mixing, etc, just let me know and I'll post that separate).

But it's still note-worthy, a fade-out can be accomplished by clicking Track --> Fade Out, and you'll then see a purple bar above your expanded view and you can click to add dots and drag them up and down to fade the volume in and out.

Also remember that your expanded view is where you would highlight parts you want to cut. I do this when maybe there is two parts of a song I want to fit in a ringtone, I'll find a good place to splice it and then remove the middle and just use a fade or mix to transition the two together.

Once you are done positioning your region and tweaking to your liking, you're ready to import into iTunes, simply go to share and send ringtone to iTunes like in the screenshot below!



GarageBand will ask you for a title, album etc, blah blah, just fill in random crap, you can change it to whatever you like in your ringtones tab in iTunes.

Now you're done and you can convert any songs you like to a ringtone without paying a dime or downloading new software!

Hope this helps a few Mac users. =)

GarageBand gives you a lot more control than free websites and software, plus you can mix songs together, just drag them both on the project. Mess with it and have fun! =)

This isn't just for jailbreakers, this works on stock iPhones too as its legitimate.

As always, thanks for reading.

-iMuggle

Update...

I know some people have asked about video tutorials. Currently my iMac has a vengeance against me and I attempted to do some video on the MacBook tonight. Well, apparently trial versions only let you record about a 1 minute video before screwing with your final product. LAME. Either way - I have to wait until I have a little extra cash to purchase a full version (or if anyone knows any freeware screencasting software, let me know!)

I plan on working on some basic tutorials tomorrow though, so I'll have some regular ones up Monday or so.

Thanks for all the e-mails and tweets. I really didn't think I'd get that much of a response from a blog, but hey, as long as you guys appreciate it and are happy, I'm happy. =)

- Ally (iMuggle)

Video tutorials and Requests

Hey guys,

Sorry I haven't posted any video tutorials. I actually sat down to do some tonight and the mic on my iMac is not working at all. Tried everything, so I'm calling Apple tomorrow. If I can't figure it out, I'll transfer all the stuff I need to the MacBook and do it from there, but I'm hoping it doesn't have to come to that as the framerate won't be as good as the iMac is a beast and I can bump it up.

Either way - if you would like to see a specific tutorial, shoot me an e-mail at iPhonebyiMuggle@me.com - I'm currently taking any requests and I'll try and get as many as I can up, whether it's a regular tutorial, or a video tutorial.

Hopefully I'll have something up by Sunday morning.

-iMuggle

Sources for icon packs and badges

A few people have asked me about icons and badges, and how to change them. I don't personally care for the default red badges, so that was the first thing I changed when I jailbroke my phone.

One place to get a lot of great icon packs is deviantart.com - just do a quick search for "iPhone icons" and you'll see tons you can download. I install them through SSH but if you have a file browser you should be able to drag and drop that way as well.

For badges, a great resource is modmyi.com - register for their forums, and a lot of people who are amazing with Photoshop post some really slick looking badges (as well as icons).

If you're an iPhone user, registering with modmyi.com is definitely a must. Some of the things you'll find on there will also be in the modmyi repository on Cydia, but a lot of it may not be.

The members over there are very helpful. I've even requested a few icons for themes in the past and within a few hours, someone makes them and posts them to the thread. Very good community.

If anyone else has any other places they download icon and badge packs from, please feel free to post it in the comments.

I'm working on a video tutorial as of how to create a basic theme/tweak themes and I'll make sure to include how to replace badge icons. Look for that soon.

Changing your root iPhone password

There was a recent story circulating around Twitter and several RSS feeds about someone hacking into iPhones and holding them hostage for a certain amount of money.

There's a simple way to avoid this. Change the root password to your iPhone. Anyone jailbroken already knows the root password to your iPhone is "alpine". And if you're anything like me, sometimes when you're done SSH'ing into your iPhone, you forget to turn openSSH access to your phone off through SBSettings.

Since I'm so forgetful, I just change my root password so it doesn't make it that easy for someone to hack into my phone remotely.

Changing your root password on your iPhone is actually quite simple and here are the steps (I'm not providing screen shots for this as it's a relatively straight forward process):

1. Download MobileTerminal from Cydia or your choice of installer if you don't already have it.

2. After you have MobileTerminal, launch it. Upon launch, you will see a command prompt.

3. Type su and hit return and you will then be asked for a password. This is logging you in as an administrator.

4. Your default password is alpine so enter that and press return again.

5. Now type passwd then hit return.

6. You should now be prompted to enter a new password. Enter your new password here and hit return.

7. You'll be asked to verify your new password, so do that, hit return, and you're done!

You now do not have the default alpine password anymore, which makes it harder for people to get into your phone using SSH vulnerabilities. In less than 30 seconds, you've protected yourself from several potential hacking threats.

Don't you feel better now?

-iMuggle

How to Upload themes to Cydia

I got a tweet the other day asking how to upload your own themes to Cydia.

If you're uploading a free theme that you do not want to sell, the easiest way to upload themes to Cydia is to submit them to modmyi.com, as they offer a very nice option for hosting your themes and apps.

Here's the link to submit:

Submit your package to Cydia via Modmyi.com

Alternately, you can create your own repo, instructions can be found at this link:

How to Create a Cydia Repo

The above guide is not mine. Modmyi.com published this Wiki with permission from MaXimus, it's original creator. So all credit for the Cydia repo tutorial goes to him. It really is a great step by step tutorial.

Jay Freeman (saurik) maker of Cydia also has a nice walkthrough of hosting repos on his own side found here:

saurik: how to host repos on Cydia

This isn't really a tutorial, but more of an information guide for those who want to host their own repos or upload themes to Cydia. I've had a few people ask me how to do this, and the more who know how, the more cool themes for all of us to download!

Hope it helps!

-iMuggle

Editing and customizing icons for iPhone (Jailbreak IS required)

Alright, I'm going to start this one off by saying you MUST be jailbroken in order to customize icons on your iPhone. I'm also going to assume you already have themes on your phone and have a decent knowledge of Winterboard.

I also recommend you download the Illumine theme from Cydia or whichever installer you choose as that will make it easier for you to follow along with exactly what I'm doing as the folders will all be the same. If you're more advanced, you can probably follow along with any theme just fine as the layouts of folders within themes are somewhat similar, depending upon the complexity of individual themes. (If you plan on creating your own theme, at the bottom of this tutorial, there is a small starting explanation that shows you how to start a theme, I'll expand upon this later in the week by adding more parts to a theme.)

Next, you need to know how to do a few things in order to do this. After jailbreaking, you need to know how to SSH into your phone. If you're not familiar with SSH, you need to get familiar with that first. *Note: Unless you feel completely comfortable doing this, I don't recommend it. Point being, SSH'ing will give you access to ALL of your iPhone's core files, so deleting/editing certain files could be disastrous if you don't know what you're doing. If you're still reading, and you're okay with all of this, continue on.

For those of you who do NOT know how to SSH, a guy over on HoFo has a site that has excellent SSH tutorials. So check that out and then come back. If you already know, just ignore the link below and continue.

How to SSH into your iPhone

Alright, for this tutorial, I'll be using Fugu on my Mac to show you how to customize icons. And for simplicity's sake, I'll be using a premade theme and showing you how to access icon folders and customize them to your liking a few different ways.

Alright, after you SSH into your phone, you should see a screen that looks like this (and remember, depending on what SSH client you are using, as well as whether you are using a Mac/PC, this screen may differ a bit, but somewhere, you should see your iPhone files, which in my case, they are in the right hand pane, the left hand pane contains files on my actual Mac):

*all screenshots can be maximized by clicking them




You are going to navigate in the right hand pane to Library --> Themes

Once inside that folder, you should see a list of all the themes you have installed on your phone. This screen pretty much brings up ANYTHING you have installed in Winterboard.

In my example, I'm going to navigate to one of my themes that I have installed. For this tutorial, I'll use the Illumine theme as my example as it's rather simple. In another tutorial, I'll used a more complete/complex theme to explain how to change different aspects of themes.

Here is the inside of my Illumine.theme folder (notice mine may look a little different than yours as I may have tweaked things here and there in the past):





Illumine is a rather large theme that comes with tons of icons in itself, you'll notice two folders. One is labeled "Icons" and the other labeled "Icons_EXTRAS".

This is probably a good time to note a common problem with some themes. After the 3.x update, certain theme overlays were messed up as the way icons cache changed. Some themes have not been updated to fix that issue. But there is an easy way to fix it. If your problem is with themes like Illumine which have a built-in overlay that should resize your icons, regardless whether there is an icon for that app or not, all you have to do is clear the icon cache and reboot your device.

To clear the icon cache, after you SSH into your phone, navigate here:

/var/mobile/Library/Caches/ then delete these 2 folders:

SpringBoardIconCache
SpringBoardIconCache-small

Respring, then reboot, and then the icons should behave the way they did before 3.x firmwares. This works for any themes that have overlays.

If you're still wanting to change icons and customize, read on dear iHacker!!

We left off talking about the 2 icon folders. Icons and Icons_EXTRAS. The Icons folder is the one your springboard is reading from. The EXTRAS folder is a folder the theme developer included with tons of extra icons you can substitute or add, but your springboard will only read those in the icons folder. So if you find an icon in the EXTRAS folder that you like, simply copy it into the actual Icons folder and that app should now have the corresponding icon. Now to view the icons in the EXTRAS folder, don't double click as that will download them to your computer and they'll show up in the left pane. Simply right click (or ctrl+click on a Mac) on them and click preview. That will show you what that icon looks like. If it's something you like, then copy it to your hard drive and paste it into the actual Icons folder within that theme.

Now this is EXTREMELY important, when naming icons, they MUST have the appropriate name, capitalization, and punctuation to work. They must also be a .png file.

Let's take an example. Say I don't have an icon in my theme for The Weather Channel. If you look at that app on your phone, underneath the app icon on your iPhone, you see the letters "TWC". That is what springboard knows the app by. So when you go to add an icon, you need to name that icon TWC.png in order for springboard to recognize it and pair it with the matching app. So if you ever run into an issue where your icon isn't showing up, make sure you named it correctly.

Now what about replacing an icon you really don't like?

Go into the icons folder, and say we want to replace the icon for Facebook. I need to find the new icon I want to use (or create it myself w/ Photoshop but that's a whole new tutorial in itself for another day) and save it to my computer. Now name that file Facebook.png and drag it into the Icons folder in Fugu or whatever SSH client you are using, like below.



Your SSH client will most likely tell you that file already exists if you're trying to replace an icon, just click the option to overwrite, and now your icon is changed! If you're creating a whole new one, it should just copy right over.

You'll repeat this same process with all the icons you want to edit or change.

If you are creating your own theme from scratch, you'll need to create a new folder for it. For example, say I wanted to create a theme called iMuggle. I would need to go to the Library --> Theme folder and make a new folder called "iMuggle.theme". Obviously you are going to have quite a few folders inside your .theme folder, but for now, we're only concerned with one, that is "Icons". that is the folder you need to stick all of your new icons in. In a later tutorial, I'll explain what other folders need to be in your .theme folder in order to create a complete theme on your own, without just editing an existing theme.

Deviantart.com has a ton of icon packs you can download for free and install, and as most people know, Cydia, Icy and Rock also have an abundance of icons.

This is a basic tutorial, if you need any other help, please leave a comment on this post or shoot me a public reply on Twitter to @iMuggle. I plan on posting a tutorial for making your own icons in photoshop and using theme developer overlays at a later date.

I simply wrote this tutorial assuming you know what icons you want to use or at least where to get different icon packs.

-iMuggle =)

iPumpkin

Not hacking related but thought I'd share the pumpkin I carved for Halloween :D

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Edit or make your own themes on iPhone (2.x and above)

This is the guide I wrote, and the site linked is a guy over on HoFo's site. He's got some REALLY good tutorials on SSH'ing and what-not.

So, here it is,

In order to do this, you have to know how to SSH into your phone. Learning how to do this allows you to do pretty much whatever you want from changing SMS bubbles to badges, to backgrounds, to making your own icons.

For this, you need to download a few things from Cydia on your phone and then a few things to your computer. This guy has excellent tutorials:

(these are 3.x tutorials by the way, but most are backwards compatible with 2.x firmwares as the processes are the same)

How to SSH your phone:

This guy uses Fugu as an SSH client on his Mac, if you are a windows user, follow similar steps, just use something like WinSCP or any similar windows based SSH client. I don't believe fugu is available for windows, but I could be wrong.


Hack that Phone - Installing OpenSSH, using Fugu, shutting off service, and changing the root and mobile passwords


How to create your own themes using Winterboard (he only does a basic tutorial, but once you get the hang of this, you pretty much will know how to edit anything you want.) He starts with an intro to winterboard, if you're more advanced, you can skip a section or two, but this is good for beginners...it starts slow and then gets in depth...

Hack that Phone - Make and use themes with WinterBoard



As far as anything else goes, if you get stuck or have questions, how about we ask all questions in this thread?

Also, if you want to know a few places to get icon packs or wallpaper packs, or want to share cool ones, put that here too.

I personally find a wealth of wallpapers and icon packs on deviantart.com

I also found quite a few different sets of SMS bubbles from modmyi.com (you can also achieve the same goal from googling "different color iPhone SMS bubbles" and it brings up several places to download cool SMS bubbles from). I know Cydia has a limited selection right now.

You can also MAKE your own icons. I use Photoshop for this, but any similar program will do. I believe the typical dimensions for iPhone icons are 59 x 60. Most people use around that range when creating them. Some theme developers typically will include the .psd within the theme bundle and you can SSH in order to obtain that and then just create a layer in photoshop to make your own icons.


*Note: Keyboard themes do NOT currently work with 3.x firmwares, there are certain ways to get them working, but SSH'ing and modding some files on your phone is necessary.

EDIT: As of writing this, I believe SOME keyboard themes work with above 3.0 but some of the older themes in Cydia, Icy, or Rock may not have been updated to be compatible with 3.x.x versions of iPhone software.

As always, happy iHacking!

-iMuggle

Next tutorial: Changing/customizing icons for iPhone

Introduction and Explanations!

Alright guys, I'm going to assume most of you that would read this probably know me in some form, whether it be in person, or from this forum or that one.

I'm Ally, or online, better known by iMuggle. I'm 24 years old. I'm an accountant by day and an iPhone/Apple freak any other time.

I've started this blog as a way to help you guys. I've been asked by several people over the past few months for tutorials. As most of you know, I've written quite a few tutorials in the past for several different forums and websites. As more and more people ask for tutorials, I figure it's easiest just to put them all in one place.

So if you see someone in a forum struggling and you know it's something I've covered, feel free to link, all I ask is to give proper credit. I will always do the same as well.

I may also post other things that may be relevant as well. Such as other bloggers and resources, as well as any articles I find that I may think people would find interesting.

If you ever need help past what I publish in a tutorial, you can reach me through the following ways:

Twitter: @iMuggle
AIM: iMuggleTiPb

Those are probably the quickest and easiest ways to contact me.

I'm going to start tonight by posting up some tutorials I'll gather from different forums that I've already written, and I've got a few requests in to write more tutorials. I'll be working on 1 tonight that deals with SSH'ing and customizing icons for iPhone.

I'll also always update Twitter as I post more blogs, so subscribe to me on Twitter!

That's all for now, and as always, happy iHacking!

-iMuggle