Cellphone ringtones

Parent Cafe
1

<p>A multi-step rant, ending with a question:</p>

<p>We recently upgraded our cellphones (Verizon). Overall, our new LG 8300 phones are much better. Much better battery life than our old phones and we even use some of the “useless” features, e.g., TheMom likes having my photo come up on screen when I call from my cell phone.</p>

<p>However, this our third generation of Verizon cellphone service. With each succeeding generation, the selection of built-in ring tones gets suckier. I do find a custom ringtone useful to pick out my phone from all the surrounding audio clutter, plus it’s now been a point of quirky individualism that my standard ring is the theme from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.</p>

<p>Verizon let’s you download various ringtones. For a fee. For a relatively expensive fee. And the kicker is that you only “rent” the tones and have to pay an annual renewal fee to keep your tone. Moreover, I’ve looked at the selections and I’m underwhelmed. In the first place, I don’t want a vocal <em>anything</em> coming out of my phone, let alone “You’re My ■■■■■■” or whatever the latest rap/hip-hop fave is. And their instrumental selections are pretty lame to begin with.</p>

<p>They do their damnedest to keep you from downloading ringtones from other sources. I don’t believe it. A midi (or wav) file is a midi file.</p>

<p>But the corollary problem is that a lot of third-party sites won’t let you browse their selections until you’ve paid up front and, given what’s on Verizon’s site as a model, I have no desire to buy a pig in a poke.</p>

<p>Well, I wound up buying a pig anyway. But at least it’s not in a poke.
<a href=“http://www.ringophone.com%5B/url%5D”>www.ringophone.com</a> has an extremely nice and broad selection. I can report that the Czech and New Zealand national anthems are both very pretty, even though I wouldn’t use them as my ringtones.</p>

<p>They do in fact have the Liberty Bell March (Monty Python) theme as well as the Hungarian Rhapsody, As Time Goes By, Gary Owen, the “Confutatis” from the Mozart Requiem, and the “Bridge of Khazad Dum” from the Lord of the Rings movies…all tones that I’d happily associate with various callers or classes of callers for instant i.d. at a listen.</p>

<p>I’ve used my phone’s web browser to navigate to the site, entered my password (yes, this one I did pay for, based upon the selection), and the phone’s icon shows that <em>some</em> kind of Internet activity is taking place.</p>

<p>Yet I’ve put the memory card in the card reader and it shows nothing downloaded. </p>

<p>I’d like to add that each generation of the manual accompanying the phone is worse than the last. The current one is little more than a recapitulation of the on-screen menus. No info as to why you would want to do such and such, what the implications are, etc.</p>

<p>So: any idea on how to download ringtones without acquiescing to Verizon’s overpriced and underwhelming service?</p>

2

<p>There’s advice there on how to convert a small mp3 and send it to your phone and set it as a ringtone.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=539986[/url]”>http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=539986&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

3

<p>TheDad, I’ve just discovered my D is some amazing type of techie hack. Somehow she managed to figure a way around Verizon’s “pig in a poke”. I don’t quite understand, but this is how I heard what she said.</p>

<p>She wanted the theme to The Office as her ringtone.
She used the voice memo recorder to “capture” the theme.
She (somehow) figured out that you can use your memo(s) as a ringtone (she says it’s in the menu).
She now has the theme from The Office as her ringtone.</p>

<p>Do people still bake files in cakes when visiting their loved ones in prison?</p>

4

<p>TheDad:</p>

<p>I noticed the same thing with my latest phone (Razr v3i) from Cingular. It now comes with a grand total of ‘0’ selections for ringtones. There’s just the single stock one. Anything else has to be purchased. This is despite the fact that the newest phones come with much more available memory for things like ringtones than former phones. It’s clearly a financial decision on the part of the Cell providers. The whole concept of ‘paying’ for something as basic as a ring tone is to me ridiculous. I can understand it perhaps for something beyond fairly basic tones but the idea of not having a dozen or so ‘canned’ ring tones is extortion.</p>

5

<p>Hrm…</p>

<p>I don’t have this problem. My midi files and MP3 files work perfectly with my phone (Samsung SGH-t809). But I did find that on occasion you have to change the MP3 files to M4A or some other silly file extension to get them to work as ringtones.</p>

<p>Did your phone come with a USB cable? Bluetooth? It might help to try to send the file instead of put it on the mini-mini-super small SD cards…</p>

6

<p>What’s wrong with the phone ringing sounding like a phone ringing?</p>

<p>636</p>

7

<p>I found away around this for all Verizon phones. This can be as simple or as complicated as you want to be. </p>

<ol>
<li>Download a program called BitPim. <a href=“http://www.bitpim.com%5B/url%5D”>www.bitpim.com</a></li>
<li>Take any song you have and chop it up using the mixer that is provided with the program.
3a. Go to <a href=“http://www.funformobile.com%5B/url%5D”>www.funformobile.com</a> and upload the ringtone you just created with BitPim, and viola, you will get a picture message with your song. Save the sound, and it will appear in the my sounds folder. I have tried this with the RAZR, Samsung a930, and the LG VX 8300 and it has worked for each of them.
3b. Get a data cable from Verizon, or on EBay, and use BitPim to upload the songs into your phone. They will go into the My Ringtones folder if you do it this way. Data cables should cost you no more than $10 USD. I found that this is the best way to upload several ringtones at once and it will not cost you a picture message. You can also upload pictures, videos, and games to your phone this way. </li>
</ol>

<p>Hope this helps, never, ever, EVER pay for a ringtone!!! $1.99 for a 20 second song snippet is a complete waste of money.</p>

8

<p>I personally dislike hearing most of the ringtones/song clips when I’m out in public, especially when they last longer than a second…I’ll pick the music I want to hear, when I want to hear it, please.</p>

9

<p>If your phone has Bluetooth, you can send a mp3 file you made yourself to your phone…if not, you can upload the file to mobile17.com and it will send it to your phone.</p>