Wired News: Stop Paying for Ring Tones
Record labels love it when fans buy a ring tone of a song they already own — the industry claims $4 billion in ring-tone sales to date. But in fairness, you shouldn’t have to pay separately just to hear your CD tracks or legally acquired MP3s as ring tones.

In most cases, you don’t have to. Putting a snippet of a CD track or MP3 file on your phone is actually very straightforward — not to mention free, if you already own the song. Following is a step-by-step guide.
What you need

* Cell phone with MP3 ring-tone support
* CD or MP3 of the song
* Any method of transferring the ring tone from computer to phone (USB, Bluetooth, e-mail, instant message, etc.)
* Audio-editing software that allows export to MP3. If you don’t already have this, Audacity is a good open-source program you can download for free, and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. You’ll also need the LAME library for Windows, Mac or Linux. (LAME is a free downloadable MP3 codec that enables Audacity to encode to MP3.)
* About 20 minutes

Detailed instructions in the rest of the Wired article.