LET THE MUSIC PLAY - MOBILE PHONE RINGTONES

Ringtones with different musical outputs in mobile phones is a fad that has caught on like wild fire all around the world. A ringtone can typically be defined as the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming call or an incoming message. Ringtones can be personalized through customizing tools.
 
Mobile phones are used as personal and business communication and data storage equipments. Ringtones with musical notes give an opportunity to change the phone ringing as per a person’s temperament, circumstances, requirements and predilections.
 
Ringtones are of various types depending upon the device used.

• Monophonic ringtones – are ringtones that can play only one type of musical tone at a time.
  
• Polyphonic ringtones – are ringtones that can play several types of tones at a time;
  
• Truetone ringtones - also known as realtones, mastertones, or superphonic ringtones are encoded with high fidelity formats such MP3, AAC, or WMA; representing the latest evolution of ringtones. Popular Truetones are often excerpts from songs. 

 Initially, ringtones used a simple bell-like tone. Modern ringtones have become multifarious beyond imagination. New mobile phones allow the users to assign different ringtones to identify different contacts. A new ringtone maker trend is also currently in vogue. Here different websites like Mobilephoria, Phone Sherpa, and Dopetone let users make ring tones from the music they already own in the MP3 or CD formats and upload directly to their mobile phones with no limit on the number of songs uploaded.
 
The ringtone formats generally available are:

• AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)– It is a ringtone format supported by some phones like Sony Ericsson W810i and iPhone and generally supports ringtones in “.m4r”.
  
  
• eMelody – It is the older Ericsson ringtone format.
  
• iMelody – It is a non-polyphonic ringtone based on Ericsson’s proprietary eMelody format and was made because eMelody had some musical limitations.
  
•  MOT - An older ringtone format for Motorola phones.
  
• KWS: Ringtone format from Kyocera.
  
• PDB - Palm database. This is the ringtone format used to load ringtones on PDA phones like Kyocera 6035 and the Handspring Treo.
  
• Morse code - Text files with a “.MORSE” extension are converted into Morse code songs.
  
• MP3 (MPEG – 1 Audio Layer 3) - It is a digital audio encoding ringtone format that uses a form of lossy data compression.
  
• MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) – It is an industry standard protocol enabling electronic musical instruments and computers to communicate and synchronize with each other.
  
• QCP – is the ringtone format used for providing voice ringtones.
  
• RTTTL (Ring Tone Text Transfer Language) developed by Nokia for transferring ringtones.
  
• RTX – It is similar to RTTTL but has additional features with different octaves.
  
• Nokia / SCKL / OTT - Nokia Smart Messaging format. Nokia phones can receive ringtones as text messages. Ringtone tools can create these text messages. This allows anyone with a compatible phone to load their own ringtones without a data cable.
  
• Samsung1 and Samsung2: Samsung keypress ringtone formats.
  
• Siemens Keypress: Can create and read in a Siemens text file format.
  
  
• SMAF (Siemens SEO binary format) – It combines MIDI with instrument sound data. It is used by Yamaha for mobile phones and PDAs. SMAF resembles MIDI but supports graphics and Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) sound playback.