Custom ringtones and text tones are great for letting your know who’s calling, or who just sent a message. But what about when your iPhone is sett to silent, and hidden in your pocket? All your alerts use the same vibration, so you have no idea if that buzz was a message from your awesome and hot significant other, or yet another eBay alert about those paperclip auctions you’re watching.

Did you know that you can set custom vibration alerts for each of your contacts? And that you can actually record your own vibration patterns and assign them to whoever you like? You can, and you’re going to love how easy it is.

If you’re still living in the early-to-mid ’00s, then you may still be interested in personal ringtones for your iPhone. And if you are, there’s no easier way to take a piece of music from your iTunes library, or to rip it from YouTube or SoundCloud, than iRingg.

This app from Softorino lets you quickly create a ringtone and push it wirelessly to your iPhone.

There are very few iOS tasks that still require a Mac. One of those is getting your own ringtones onto your iPhone. You can buy them, but you can’t add a downloaded ringtone onto your iPhone without hooking up to iTunes. Or can you? GarageBand on iOS lets you save your own creations as ringtones, to be used immediately. Here’s how.

The latest version of iTunes — 12.7 — removes the App Store. That’s bad news for folks who like to keep backups of old iOS apps around, but good news for people who have bloat and clutter. But the update also removes all your custom ringtones, so you can’t manage them from your Mac.

Don’t despair. You can still download purchased ringtones, and copy your own tones across from the Mac. It’s just not obvious how to do it any more.

The iPhone’s classic marimba ringtone has grown a bit annoying after nine years of playing in pockets across the globe. We’ve seen the classic tone remixed a ton of different ways, but perhaps none are better than this classical remix cooked up by musician Tony Ann.

The pianist has recreated the most popular ringtones ever into one incredible classic arrangement that includes some little gems from other carriers and cellphone makers that you’ll recognize instantly.

Check it out:

With so many people in the world having iPhones with the same ringtones, hearing a ringer go off can be irritating and confusing. The iTunes Store sells ringtones, but they can become quite expensive if you like switching things up a lot.

In today’s video, we show you how to solve this annoying problem by creating your own free ringtones in iTunes. Just follow these simple steps to separate yourself from the crowd instantly.

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There can’t be much I hate more than a bad ringtone. I have one (because my phone is a Samsung and all of its tones are awful); my neighbor has one, which he takes forever to answer when his family call from overseas at like two in the morning every day; idiots on the bus and metro have them (usually some tinny-sounding “music” snippet of a record I never want to hear in full); and even my parents have them — not that anyone ever calls their cellphones, thank god.

In fact, there are only two things in the world of ringtones that make me optimistic. The first is that — with the slow death of Nokia — the horrible default Gran Vals tone (and its cheesily remixed derivatives) is also dying.

The second is Cleartones Organic, a set of 50 ringtones and 50 notifications which will calm you like a cool forest breeze.

Tones looks to be just about the coolest way to create custom ringtones for your iPhone that I have seen. Then again, I haven’t seen many as I’m not a thoughtless teenager who thinks that other people want to hear his crappy music every time a call comes in.

Better still, Tones puts iPhone ringtone editing just where it should be: on the iPhone itself.

GarageBand for OS X changed the way us mere mortals create great music on their Macs. Included with all new Macs or available in the Mac App store for $15, it gives musicians from the brand new to the seasoned veteran a way to record all kinds of music, connecting real instruments, MIDI devices, and microphones to your Mac for easy music sessions. It also does some other cool things, which we’ll tell you about right now.