Many people are missing being able to add custom ringtones to Windows Phone 7. With the “Mango” update coming to Windows Phones later this fall, you’ll finally be able to add your own ringtones. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly an intuitive or straight forward process, at least not at this time. There’s still at least a few months before Mango is released so things may change.

First off you’ll need the new Zune 4.8 beta software on your PC along with a Windows Phone 7.5 Mango beta device. There are a few requirements for making yourself some ringtones that we learned from the Windows Phone Blog. They need to be less than 39 seconds long, smaller than 1 MB, saved as MP3 or WMA format, and not have any DRM protection.

Those requirements will rule out all Zune Pass content and practically any song that you can buy from Zune. So you’ll have to do some audio editing. Any audio editing program will do and you might want to try Audacity for free. Find the section that you want to use for your ringtone and delete the rest of the audio so that you have a nice loop. Save the edited file as WMA and then import it into your Zune music collection.

The next step is the most important. In the Zune Collection library, right click the ringtone you’ve created and choose “Edit”. (You can do this to multiple ringtones all at once by selecting them all before right clicking.) This will open the “Edit Song Info” window. Under the “Genre” pop-up menu, you must now set it as “Ringtone” and click OK to save. Be careful though, in the current beta, there is a default genre named “Ring Tone” with a space in the name. If you choose that one, it won’t work. You may need to type “Ringtone” yourself in the Genre field.

After you do that, you can now drag the custom ringtone to the phone icon in the bottom left in order to sync the ringtone to your device. Since it has the “Ringtone” genre, it will not show up in your music library, but it will show up in your ringtones menu.