But users are not that enthusiastic...

Sep 12, 2007 11:17 GMT  ·  By

Although announced last week and expected for many months, Apple has just turned ringtones on at the iTunes Store. Although it has been much talked about, the service has so far left the vast majority of users unimpressed.

iTunes customers can now create a custom ringtone for their iPhone by selecting up to a 30-second segment from over a million participating songs on iTunes and easily sync them onto their iPhone. Customers can choose any part of the song for the ringtone and custom length fade in and out points can be used, at a cost of 99 cents per ringtone. While users were surprised when the iPhone came out and the feature was missing, they are not exactly clamoring up to it now.

The Apple service is quite good all things considered and it is far cheaper than many other similar services. Also, Apple offers a significant amount of freedom when it comes to choosing the length of the clip, the location of it and the fade durations, while other similar services offer pre-defined clips. Despite this, a great many users would simply buy another song instead of a ringtone, which they feel is better value for their money. Similarly, other users are still complaining about being locked into iTunes tracks and not being able to use musical clips they created themselves or other sound effects. This lack of enthusiasm, combined with known workaround for getting any track into the iPhone as a ringtone and third party solutions that will do the same thing are all adding up into a very slow start for Apple's ringtone service. Other more objective factors include not being able to use 'available as a ringtone' as a criterion when making iTunes store searches, leaving users to manually browse to each artist, album and track in order to see if it is available.