If you've ever wanted to update your iPhone's sounds without paying $1.99 or more for professionally made ringtones, iRinger offers an easy way to make ringtones from your own audio files.

To be brutally honest, iRinger is in a crowded market and it doesn't offer any new options when compared with other iPhone ringtone creators. However, it does work very quickly. It has an intuitive interface, and while it's not perfect, it's an efficient way to create iPhone ringtones without learning any complicated workarounds for the iPhone's picky format requirements.

When you load iRinger, you'll select your source audio and move a few slider bars to select an appropriate 30-second or smaller section of the file. You can select MP3 files, WAV files and other common formats. After you make your selection, you click a button and iRinger does the rest of the work. It copies the clip from your source file and outputs it in the iPhone's M4R ringtone format. You can then load the file into iTunes and transfer it to your iPhone.

We wish that iRinger could load ringtones directly onto the iPhone, but Apple is notoriously strict with software limitations. iRinger could also support more output formats, which would make it a useful ringtone creator for other types of smartphones. On the plus side, the program allows you to add special effects to your sound files. While you don't get high-quality effects, you can make some interesting sounds with a microphone and a little bit of spare time.

Overall, iRinger works exceptionally well. At 4.6 megabytes, the program is small and stable enough to suit most iPhone users. While iRinger doesn't reinvent the wheel, the application's designers avoided major missteps and delivered a simple, easy-to-use ringtone generator.