How To
Monophonic
Monophonic
Early phones had the ability to play only
monophonic ring tones, short tunes played with simple tones. These early phones
also had the ability to have ring tones programmed into them using an internal
ring tone composer. Various formats were developed to enable ring tones to be
sent via SMS text, for example RTTTL encoding.
Polyphonic
Polyphonic means that multiple notes can be
played at the same time using instrument sounds such as guitar, drums,
electronic piano, etc. Many phones are now able to play more complex polyphonic
tones; up to 128 individual notes with different instruments are played
simultaneously to give a more realistic musical sound.
Mobile phone handsets manufacturers have taken
full advantage of new technologies to improve speakers in order to produce
better sound quality.
Polyphonic ringtones are based upon midi or
midi-like sequences so can pool in the 100+ different midi sounds, many
polyphonic capable phones are able to play standard midi files, others play
sp-midi which is scalable polyphony and depending on the number of channels the
phone can play the handset will render that many notes. On an old polyphonic
capable phone may play 4 notes at once with the flashier new handsets being able
to render 128 notes at once. Many phones support SMAF (.mmf) files which is
based upon a sound format devised by Yamaha.
Real sound ring tones
A new version of ring tones, often
called either real sound ring tones, music ring tones, voice tones, mastertones,
realtones, singtones or true tones, now use the Pulse-code modulation encoding
of the real sound. The 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 AAC, MP3, WMA, WAV, QCP, or AMR
that can be used as a ring tone on many Series 60, Symbian or smartphones. Many
cell phone manufacturers are including voice ring tones on most of their newly
released phones, including Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. The first real
music ringtone was created by Richard Fortenberry and Brad Zutaut and was sent
over the Sprint network. They were two of the founders of a company called
Xingtone. It was from a song by the band Devo.
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