How to Find the Right Ringtone for Your Mobile Phone
Mobile Ringtones are about public performance and personalization. The early mobile phones were only able to emit
basic tones but today can play entire songs. Hot mobile ringtones are available either for free or a small cost. To
download ringtones the mobile phone must be internet and text capable and enabled, but not all mobile phones support voice or music ringtones.
Mobile phone carriers charge extra fees to purchase and upload ringtones. So what are real sound ringtones,
polyphonic and monophonic ringtones?
It is worthwhile knowing the difference between all three as one does not want to spend money on the latest movie theme if the
phone you have only supports monophonic mobile ringtones.
Monophonic or cingular ringtones play a song using one instrument and one note at a time using basic
sequencing technology. They are a good choice for clear easy to distinguish ringtones. Today most cingular
ringtones are available as a free download since they have been outclassed by polyphonic
and MP3 mobile ringtones.
Polyphonic ringtones are the most popular because they sound good and most phones can handle them. A
synthesizer creates hot ringtones to simple instrumental versions of songs. They can play songs created with multiple
musical instruments which can make your phone sound like a digital orchestra in your pocket. Most polyphonic mobile
ringtones are usually stored in MIDI format.
Legacy ringtones use simple tones to create short tunes and are currently available for the
Motorola T250, T192, T191 V2288, V100, V50 and A008.
Voice mobile ringtones are people talking to a background of sound clips. Your phone requires special
features to play voice ringtones but are downloaded the same way as polyphonic ringtones.
Custom ringtones are currently the most popular and are easy to create by making access to ringtones simple.
Full music mobile ringtones play real songs complete with vocals and the background instruments. They are much more complicated
than polyphonic ringtones. Also referred to as MP3 ringtones, voice tones or true tones, the mobile phone doesn't
generate MP3 ringtones but merely plays back the digitally sampled recordings. They can be highly personalised but are
not the best choice for people that work in noisy environments like shopping centres where it will make it harder to distinguish from real music.
True tone ringtones are a much larger music file thus are much higher quality than polyphonic mobile ringtones and
sound like real sound ringtones and less like ice-cream vans. Some of the formats for ringtones are keypress,
MIDI, RTTL, Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) and MP3. The most common format is MP3 which will sound very clear, although some older phones will
receive ringtones in AAC format which can vary in sound volume and quality.
Full music mobile ringtones are purchased and downloaded to the mobile phone from the mobile network
although data charges can make this prohibitive. The other way to download a song is to 'side load' it, a process of downloading it to a computer
first then transferring it to the mobile phone via infra-red, Bluetooth or cable connections.
Apple iPhones are only designed for Apple iTunes store; the user can only purchase songs here and must
pay an additional 99 cents on top of the song price itself to use as a ringtone. Only a small subset of the songs in the iTunes store are
eligible to be used as a ringtone. If you decide to create another ringtone using a different subset of the same song then you must pay for the
song twice. iTunes MP3 songs and ringtones are only useable with Apple iPods, iPhones, Mac computers or
Apple TV. Apple has recently added the capability to create mobile ringtones in
'GarageBand' and download them to the iPhone. The vast majority of revenue generated from music in the iTunes store is
funneled back to the record companies and Apple makes very little on its own.
The hot mobile ringtone business is a $4 billion market and is currently flourishing worldwide.
