Cell Phone RingTones: How Do I Make Them?

[amclint]

I am thinking about cell phone ringtones, does anyone know what is required to change an MP3 to a cell phone ringtone that works with phones supporting the more advanced polyphonic capabilities (ie voice, multiple channel sound)? I've googled on and off for a few days and haven't found much of anything, but there are websites that you can buy ringtones on without specifying your phone model so there must be some standard....

Aaron Clint Work

[Maximilien]

depeding on your phone and/or carrier it might not be possible without hacking and unlocking the phone. have a look at the different forums on http://www.howardchui.com[^]

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Maximilien Lincourt Your Head A Splode - Strong Bad

[benjymous]

If you get yourself a Windows Mobile based phone, it'll play mp3/wav/wma as a ringtone without requiring you to do anything, bar copying the audio file onto your phone

[stephen hazel]

I really have no idea either. But I'd guess we're talkin SMS'ed midi files... Downloading a .WAV file might be possible on some... But, really, no idea...:)

[amclint]

Yes, thank you. That had a link back to a site that somewhat confirmed my thinking...most phones that don't support email/web browsing don't support MP3 ringtones (ie, midi) and you then have to connect it to your PC via USB cable, Bluetooth, Infrared in order to transfer the ringtone. Suffice to say I don't want that kind of trouble so I think I'll stick with MP3 only....now the hard part is letting the users pick a 15-30 second piece of an uploaded MP3 and playing that back to them, then if they like it they can send just that piece to their phone as the ringtone. I'm still thinking about how to do this...I know there are some open source MP3 encoding libraries, but as for how to get into the song and only save a piece as MP3 will take some additional work. Thanks everyone for your comments

Aaron Clint Work

[Shog9 0]

amclint wrote:

there must be some standard

There are lots. Most of 'em are just MIDI files, though different phones have different methods of installing them. The PCM (WAV) ringtones tend to be encoded in something specific to the phone manufacturer, although some new phones can use regular MP3 files. Again, actually getting the files onto the phone is unnecessarily difficult in many cases.

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