Real Tracks as Ringtones on iPhone

I am just a liiiitle more tempted to actually buy an iPhone now that it’s integrated with iTunes to CREATE CUSTOM RINGTONES FROM REAL SONGS! OMG!

As someone whose phone has been proclaimed extinct by AT&T/Cingular/Motorola and who has never had more than a single, extremely boring ringtone, this gets me very excited. But maybe the all caps and OMG already gave that away…

One thing that isn’t great about this latest development is the snarky new copy on the Apple site. There, you’ll discover that springing for the iPhone and making use of this new feature is “win-win.” Really, why not drop megabucks on a phone and almost $2 on a ringtone? I mean, it’s not like you’re using an application to do it. You’re using a friend. Yes, the choicest phrase is: “You and iTunes are old friends by now.”

To me, iTunes is more like a frenemy. I’ve been using it since 2003, consistently downloading each new version ever since. I even wrote a lengthy article about it for my school paper in undergrad. But in some ways it’s still not up to par with what I remember of Winamp and The Software Formerly Known As Musicmatch Jukebox (which now has a title so redundant that it makes me a little queasy: Yahoo! Music Jukebox. See? You want to barf now, don’t you?).

But I’ll keep on using it and, if I stumble upon some good fortune, make use of it with an iPhone while waiting for the day when it actually remembers which songs I’ve tried to delete from my library but not from my computer over and over again.