Okay. So, recently, Apple surprised us all by slashing $200 from the selling price of the 8GB iPhone, barely a few months after its release, with accompanying rumors that the 4GB version of that primo gadget will be done away soon. Apparently, the price slash was done so that the iPhone can continue selling despite the release of the iPod Touch in the market.

If you are one of those people who are still grumbling about the price slash, here is another bone to chew on. You can now convert any song you buy from the iTunes store to a ringtone for your iPhone. You do this by using graphical software that lets you pick any segment of the song you want to convert and make it into a ringtone that has a length of 12 to 21 seconds. The catch is that you will have to pay an additional 99¢ for converting that song to a ringtone, on top of the 99¢ you will have to shell out anyhow for the rights to using the song.

Anyone with half a brain in his or her head would know right on that this scheme is one major rip-off. I know I am not alone in saying so, and I find it a little disgusting that Apple is cooking up such unsavory schemes to get some extra cents off of its customers.

Thankfully, a Good Samaritan from the MacRumors forum said that you can actually get away with converting an iTunes song into a ringtone for free. All it takes is a simple switching of file extensions. Just replace the .AAC extension of any song you got from iTunes with the .M4R iPhone ringtone extension, sync your iPhone and you are good to go. The cost of converting your new ringtones: zero.