I haven’t been a huge fan of custom iPhone ringtones until I found out that Apple revised its policy about apps that allow you to edit songs on-device (the revision apparently came with the public release of the Review Guidelines) and directly export them to iTunes. When I did, I downloaded Ringtone Designer Pro for iPhone and started rolling with it.

Last week, though, I also discovered a neat app in the Cydia Store called AnyRing (BigBoss repository, $3.99) that, in a very ugly interface, lets you set any song on your iPhone as your default ringtone.

Ringtone Designer Pro has a stylish dark interface which enables you to pick a song from your iPod app and create a ringtone up to 40 seconds long by moving a slider above the actual song’s graph. It’s very intuitive. You can set the ringtone to start with a fading effect (I did) and even record your own personal ringtone through the built-in speaker interface. Once you’ve saved the song, you have to connect the iPhone to iTunes, move to the “Apps” tab and find Ringtone Designer Pro, export the newly created ringtone to your computer, import it back to iTunes and sync.

A clunky process, I know, but it works and doesn’t take much to get used to. You’ll find the ringtone in the Sounds tab in the Settings app.

AnyRing takes a very different approach as it can break Apple’s rules being sold through Cydia. With AnyRing you can pick any song from your device and use it as a ringtone without having to edit it. You just choose it and set it. Of course there are some options to play with, such as the possibility to set a customized start / end time and the totally awesome option to create contact-specific ringtones. You can also record your own ringtone. AnyRing’s ringtones, however, don’t show up in the Settings app.

I’m not really a ringtone nerd and I’m new to this “create your own ringtone” app scene on the iPhone, but I can say these two apps I’ve tried are pretty good. Ringtone Designer Pro is cleaner and cheaper ($0.99 in the App Store), AnyRing allows more customization and the usual jailbreak “hacking” feel.