Short History of Cellphone Ringtones

RobotWisdom writes "This week's New Yorker magazine includes an interesting short history of cellphone ringtones, including statistics on their (huge) profitability worldwide. My favorite quote: 'I spent three days of productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtone versions of speed metal, trying to find exactly the ringtone that expressed my personality with enough irony and enough coolness that I could live with it going off ten times a day. In a quiet room, in a meeting, this phone's gonna go off-- what are they going to hear?'"

beep

[3.09 a hour]

This is why i use the single beep ringer, its short and functional, and acceptable in all areas. As an added benifit, if you left it on somewhere you shouldn't like school or the movies, one beep could be anything and mos tpeople arn't even sure they heard it.

Re:The only ringtone needed EVAR

[Guano_Jim]

Vibrate.

Indeed. [homemade-sex-toys.com]

Re:Just use Pop Goes the Weasel and be done with i

[Anonymous Coward]

Entry of the Gladiators by Julius Fucik

Re:Ringtones are one of the dumbest things to pay

[Hes Nikke]

here's your fix [smashthetones.com]... Give an MP3/MIDI... :P

Western Electric 554 ringer

[JeffTL]

I use a recording of a vintage telephone's mechanical ringer. It gets my attention, and isn't horribly aggravating -- it's quite obviously a telephone, making a sound to which most people are accustomed.

Ericofon.com doen't just have Ericsson phones -- they have all types of ringer recordings, which I have had good luck converting to AMR (once I change the WAV file a bit so my AMR converter will work) and USBing over to my Nokia phone.

The sound can be kind of surprising if you aren't expecting it, being as it sounds just like a regular telephone but is in someone's pocket, but it sounds kind of nice, and whoever said that a telephone's ringer should be a bloody iPod?

Re:wow

[tomhudson]

unsuccessfully finding a "free" ringtone website

All you have to do is look at the page source for any of the sites that demo the ring tones (they're usually along the lines of ringtones/poly0010, ringtones/poly0011, ringtones/poly0012 ...). curl and wget are your friends.

I grabbed a couple hundred from a pay site that way, got them to play in xmms, along with selected Weird Al tunes, then plugged the sound card output into the company phone system's "hold" music for a couple of days (took them that long to realize people on hold were getting Neutron Dance or Amish Paradise instead of muzak)...

Re:The ringtone craze

[sconeu]

On sprint, not only do you have to pay for them, but they're DRM'ed to not be useable after 90 days.

<MR-ROGERS>
Can you say "Cash Cow"? I knew you could.
</MR-ROGERS>

BZZZZZZZT! BZZZZZZZZT! BZZZZZZZZT! BZZZZZZZZZT!

[Thud457]

Leaving your phone on a hard desk when set to vibrate's pretty damn annoying. The whole desktop acts as an amplifier, and if it rings long enough, it goes "thump" when it falls off the edge onto the floor.

Re:Ringtones are one of the dumbest things to pay

[xstonedogx]

I don't pay for mine.

I've got an LG VX4600, one of these [mygift.com], BitPim [bitpim.org] and a collection of MP3s.

I've also used it to remove the "Verizon Wireless" banner from the phone and to upload and download photos/images.

Re:What are they going to hear?

[EspoManiac]

Here you are:
http://www.geek.nl/pics/dilbert-arch/dilbert-20030 704.gif [www.geek.nl]

Re:wow

[MikeFM]

If your phone has web access then it should be no big deal to install a ringtone of your own. Most phones, even the cheapy ones, have supported web access for years now. It's not to hard to install them if you have your own web server or use one of the free services available to 'send' the ringtone to your phone.

I'm working on an opensourced program that will ease producing wallpapers and ringtones and send them directly to your phone or webserver for you. If interested ask on the mobile-oss mailing list [kavlon.org]. Let me know what model of phone you have and what carrier you use.

Nokia == Free ring tones

[sunderland56]

What gets me is - people actually PAY for ring tones. Get a Nokia (which are pretty much the best phones anyway). Go to the Nokia web site, and download their software. Now you can create ANY ring tone from ANY CD you want. Soft Cell, Young Marble Giants, Converge.... you name it, you can do it. Alert tones, wallpapers, etc. too.