iPhone Ringtone Alternatives

Apple introduced custom ringtones today (as you may have heard) allowing you to create 30-second ringtones from over 500,000 ringtone-ready songs in the iTunes Store catalog. Said songs are marked with a bell icon and have a total cost of $1.98, which includes the price of the track and ringtone (if you already own the song, then you only pay .99 cents for the ringtone alone). The new iTunes version is supposed to include a ringtone editor that lets you determine the fade in, fade out points of your 30 second clip. The best part is you can assign a custom ringtone to individual callers, but at $2 per ringtone, this will quickly get expensive.

TUAW put together a short list of alternative applications that let you create iPhone ringtones using songs you already own for a one-time fee, and some for no fee at all. SendSong, iBrickr, iPhoneRingtoneMaker, iFuntastic, and iToner sound like good alternatives, but my favorite hack is creating ringtones with iTunes previews. They have a complete guide on how to do this here, although I'm not entirely sure how legal this is. My guess is it's probably very illegal. Anyway, I thought I'd let you know about your other options.

Anyone care to share other ringtone-creating alternatives?

Apple Event: Ringtones coming to iPhone