Ahhh, the silent ringtone. It’s been on every phone I’ve had in the last eight years or so. But, like voice dialing, one-touch speed dialing, MMS, and the ability to shoot video of my dog running around at the beach, it’s one of the things I’ve had to give up since transitioning to an iPhone.

I can hear you already. “Just flip the switch to make your phone silent, Stupid.”

But I don’t want my phone to be silent; I want the ability to selectively silence my phone for certain callers. Those annoying telemarketing recordings come to mind. Or maybe your crazy ex, or perhaps your parole officer if you’re on the lam. Anyway, the point is, the iPhone doesn’t offer a No Ring option for your contacts. But with a little GarageBand fiddling, you can roll your own non-ring in a couple minutes, with just a few clicks.

First, fire up GarageBand, and create a new project. Give your new project a name. Whatever name you use will be the name of your finished ringtone, but you can always change it in iTunes later. Click through to the GarageBand editing window. At the bottom of the screen, click on the Cycle Region button (it's the one on the right with the two arrows going in a circle).

Back at the top of the editing window, drag the yellow Cycle Region bar so that it’s one beat long (each tic mark represents a single beat). It could be longer, but it’s silence, so it doesn’t matter, and it takes up less space on your phone.

Under the Share menu, choose Send Ringtone To iTunes. iTunes will open, and your shiny new silent tone will be included with any other ringtones you might have. Sync the tone to your iPhone, and now when phone spam rears its ugly head, you’ll be prepared to vanquish it for good.

Going forward, you can either assign the silent tone to specific contacts, or simply create one contact called “Spam” and add additional numbers to that contact as you come across numbers that you want to avoid completely. If your iPhone is set to vibrate when it rings, it will still vibrate when the silent ring plays, but at least your ringtone won’t interrupt while you’re watching reruns of Dexter.

And by the way: You can use the same Cycle Region trick to turn almost any audio file into a ringtone, and you don’t have to pay 99-cents to do it. Just don’t tell Apple (or Coldplay, who’s currently atop iTunes ringtones chart) we told you that.