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Need custom ringtones? Of course you do. Everyone needs custom ringtones. People are buying them by the millions. But you really don’t need to shell out your hard earned cash for ringtones from your favorite music in your iTunes library. I mean, you already paid for it, right?

Yes it is possible to make free ringtones from iTunes using Garage Band or some other MP3 editor, but it is a bit of a pain to do it. And yes it’s possible to pay Apple to make your ringtones for you. But they charge you every time you do it. If you only want one or two ringtones, that’s not a big deal, but face it: once you start making ringtones from your favorite music, it’s kind of hard to stop.

For $14.95, you can get a quick and easy ringtone maker from PocketMac. It’s as simple to use as iTunes, and the entire application is in the iPhone GUI format. So the look and feel is as though you are creating the ringtone directly on your iPhone. And since the software does all of the file and name conversion for you, and the editing process is completely painless, it’s as though you ARE doing it all on the iPhone. The one caveat is that this is a Mac only application, and we know there are some Windows users out there with iPhones.

The process of creating a ringtone with Pocketmac Ringtone Studio is simplicity itself. Just drag your favorite song into the application (it looks as though you are dragging the file into your iPhone). If your song is more than 30 seconds (the time limit for ringtones) it will automatically tell you the song is too long and opens up a pair of sliders. Slide the start and stopping points of the sliders to any position in the song you want that is under 30 seconds. Then click “create.” Ringtone studio automatically puts the file into the ringtone folder of iTunes with the correct ringtone suffix.

Technically, these aren’t “free” ringtones. You have to pay for the software.

But this is the best kind of software. Simple. Painless. Inexpensive.