Different Ringtone Formats
By Michael Thomson

Ringtones are musical sounds that a mobile phone or cell phone plays when an incoming call or text message is received to the handset. Because the popularity and technology advantage of mobile phones over basic landline telephones, ringtones can be downloaded to a handset and used to personalize a callers ringing tone. The fact that users can choose what ringtone there mobile phone rings too, is the biggest selling point and the main purpose of ringtones popularity.

There are various different formats of ringtone, and each format of ringtone is more suited to a range of different manufacturers and models of mobile phone. Many people who purchase a mobile phone think that they can receive any type of ringtone; this is not the case in many situations.

At the moment, there are currently 5 different formats of ringtone available:

RTTTL, which is short for Ring Tones Text Transfer Language, is a simple text based format that you can use to make/create ringtones that can be uploaded or transferred onto your mobile phone via various mobile phone uploading techniques e.g. Infrared, SMS, and Bluetooth.

Monophonic ringtones are very basic ringtones, most commonly found on older mobile phones such as the Nokia 3210. Monophonic ringtones are only capable of making one sound at a time; hence monophonic. Each tone or sound is created at a different frequency creating a melodic, but simple sound. RTTTL is the basis behind monophonic ringtones.

Polyphonic Ringtones are compatible on mobile phones that can produce the playing of up to 16 separate tones simultaneously. Polyphonic ringtones are slightly more musical than monophonic ringtones, but there is still no real comparison to a real life song. Most modern mobile phones support polyphonic ringtones.

MP3 ringtones also know as real tones, real music tones and true tones are ringtones that are complete emulations of CD quality music. As the name suggest, MP3 ringtones are just MP3 music files that are assigned as ringtones. This allows the user to have perfectly quality sounds coming from there mobile phone, which for the first time has allowed mobile phones to produce real life sounds such as signing and voices. Many people now download full track albums to there mobile phone and simply use the files for recreation, such as using the mobile phone as an MP3 Player, then assign the MP3 file as a ringtone. This has seen a big surge in ringtone sales as it allows consumers to kill two birds with one stone.

With today's technology increasing and the market for mobile phone content rapidly expanding, we have seen the creation of video ringtones. Video ringtones are simply small video clips with a MP3 file assigned to play in the background, so when you receive an incoming call to your mobile phone, the video and ringtone is played. Although video ringtones have been around for a while now, they have never really become main stream and could be a new market for many mobile ringtone websites.

The author of this article is Michael Thomson, the Marketing Director of Schnozberry, an online source for downloading ringtones and various other mobile phone content.