Apple launched the browser-based iTunes Previews last November. Clicking on a link such as this one will open the album in the browser instead of iTunes.
From there you would go on to iTunes to buy the song or the album.
Now, Apple has introduced a 30-sec music preview to the songs in the browser-based iTunes Preview. if you hover over the song now, you will see the play button on each song and you hit that to listen to 30-second preview of the song right from your browser.
TUAW just posted a nifty trick for some source-code-view savvy folks. You can take these 30-second previews embedded in the browser and turn them into iPhone compatible ringtones.
Here’s how to create those legal music ringtones right from Apple
- Find the snippet you are interested in
- View the page source
- Scroll down until you see a line like
audio-preview-url=http://a1.phobos.apple.com/us/r1000/016/Music/3a/7b/83/mzm.ekrigiqi.aac.p.m4a - Copy the url and paste it into Safari’s downloads window
- You’ll get a file named mzm.ekrigiqi.aac.p.m4a
- Replace the .aac.p.m4a extension with .m4r
- Drop the .m4r file into iTunes and sync
You can’t choose the 30-second you want to listen but if the preview was all you wanted, this is as easy as it can get. Legally.
Here is a couple of other ways of creating your iPhone ringtones.
- Create free iPhone ringtones with iTunes
- Simplest way to get popular iPhone ringtones
- How to create free custom ringtones for iPhone
[via TUAW]
