iPhone hacking genius reveals yet another ringtone hack

It has been great to see the iPhone hacking community at work on the iPhone, we have had quite a few iPhone hacks, native iPhone applications and games being released at a hectic pace. But sometimes you just love to write about a hack which might sound simple but needs a genius to reveal it.

Cleverboy, aka Dudley, is just that kind of iPhone hacking genius, he is the same guy who had figured out how to add ringtones using iTunes by just changing the extension. He has now figured out what differentiates a song from a ringtone as far as iTunes is concerned.

Cleverboy was the one who had posted instructions on how to "convert" AAC music files to ringtones in iTunes 7.4. (see iPhoneHacks.com, Add Custom Ringtones to your iPhone with iTunes 7.4 for FREE. Seriously?) Apple had to come up with an emergency release to fix the bug in iTunes. That seems to have motivated the iPhone hacking genius to dig deep into the m4a metadata to figure out what identifies the role of a file.

To help in this investigation, he used AtomicParsley, a lightweight command line program for reading, parsing and setting metadata into MPEG-4 files supporting these styles of metadata, and after some hacking discovered that setting the value of "stik" metadata to 14 turned any AAC file into a ringtone.

This is what he had to say: "The file immediately appeared in my ringtone list, and after syncing, it appeared on my phone without one iota of complaint. --NONE".

Ain't that great, the command line that you need to use to convert an AAC file to ringtone is as mentioned below:

AtomicParsley mmbop.m4a --stik value=14

I am sure that Apple will release quick fixes to plug such holes; however they might need to do some serious brainstorming to probably rework ringtones as they don't want to end up looking foolish with such iPhone hacks again. I guess they are now realizing the actual cost of selling ringtones for the additional 99c (if you have the song) for each ringtone.

Congrats Cleverboy for a really neat iPhone hack.

I guess the next thing to do would be to wait for someone to create an automator program like iRing 2.0 to automate this hacking process. Read iPhoneHacks.com, iRing 2.0: Free Automator Application to create ringtones for the iPhone.

[via Cleverboy's blog]

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