- Ringtones-

Mobile Phone Rings Tones


A ringtone is a sound made by a phone to indicate a prescene of an incoming call. Yet now the term is used to describe tones, dials, and rings, for the commercial industry based around mobile phones. Customisable sounds available on mobile phones, whether music, jokes, impersonations, or alert sirens. This facility was originally provided so people would be able to determine when their phone was ringing in the company of other owners. Newer phones let users associate a different ringtone for each phonebook entry. Newer phones can also use short pieces of music as ringtones, and the sale of these has become a major success of the music industry. Ringtone advertising has become popular, though they have also attracted a great deal of criticism.

A polyphonic ringtone is a ringtone that makes use of polyphony. The first polyphonic ringtones used sequenced recording methods such as MIDI. Such recordings specify what instrument should play a note at a given time, but the actual instrument sound is dependent upon the playback device.

An alternative to a ringtone for mobile phones is a vibrating alert. It is especially useful in noisy centres.

Monophonic: early phones had an ability to play only monophonic ringtones, short tunes played with simple tones. Then Polyphonic ringtones arrived and this meant multiple notes could be played concurrently using instrument sounds such as guitar, drums, piano. Many phones play complex polyphonic tones up to 128 individual notes with different instruments are played at the same time for a realistic musical sound.

Real sound ringtones also known as music ringtones, voice tones, mastertones, realtones, singtones or true tones, now use the Pulse-code modulation encoding of the real sound. These real sounds can be actual pieces of music, along with all lyrics and the entire song backing music, including backing singers. They are usually contained in compressed format such as MP3, WMA, WAV, QCP, or AMR which can be used as a ringtone on many Series 60, Symbian or smartphones. Cell phone manufacturers include voice ringtones on most of the newly released phones, including Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

Crazy Frog

Crazy Frog is used in the marketing of a ringtone based on "The Annoying Thing", a computer animation created by Erik Wernquist. Marketed by the ringtone provider Jamba. The Crazy Frog spawned a worldwide hit single with a remix of "Axel F", which reached the number one spot in the UK, Australia and most of Europe. The album Crazy Frog Presents Crazy Hits and second single "Popcorn" continue to enjoy worldwide chart success. The Crazy Frog has also spawned a range of merchandise and toys which were very popular for Christmas 2005.

Sweety the Chick is a mobile phone ringtone, wallpaper, and 3G video by Jamba. It was first advertised internationally on music video channels in 2004.

Nessie the Dragon is a mobile ringtone character created by Jamba. The first Nessie song and video, "Dragon Love" features a mobile phone ringing, followed by the small dragon 'melting' out of the phone and singing and dancing before returning to its electronic home. The second ringtone, "Love Burns" is completely instrumental. The video features Nessie hatching from an egg, to put out a flame on the end of its tail. The name "Nessie" is likely based on the same nickname of the Loch Ness Monster.

Jamba is a mobile phone content provider, Berlin, Germany.

In China and the company's English speaking markets, currently Australia, Ireland, the UK, and the US, the company trades as Jamster and RingtoneKing.


Moviso is a unit of Bellevue-based InfoSpace (nasdaq: INSP - news - people ) and sells downloading services to AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, Cingular and Virgin Mobile, as well as handset makers Nokia, Motorola and Samsung. Once its licensing team secures rights to a song from the music publisher, as well as from the artist if the ring tone will feature a performance, Moviso's developers format the song into digital formats, allowing the ringtone to be played on one of the 300 handsets which accept ringtone downloads. The price of the ring tone gets split between the carrier, ringtone vendor and owner of the music copyright, with the carrier getting about half.


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