What is a Ringtones?

There was once a time when a phone ringing was an annoying sound and pretty standard. The time before cell phones hit the scene we all heard the familiar ring-ring, ring-ring of our home or office phones. When cell phones first arrived, the sound was no better, mostly just a higher pitched ring than a land phone. Kind of shrill sounding. Soon different sounds could be chosen from a menu of sounds ranging from a bird chirp to thunder. It wasn’t until phones developed over time and technology made it possible to not only have ringtones already installed on your phone, but to allow you to download your own ringtones.
Cell phones today use a microprocessor, a little memory chip, to enable all sorts of cool features that makes the phone more than just a communication device. A ringtone is a computer program that gets stored on the memory chip. The program tells the computer in the phone what to play when user receives a call. Most cell phones today are ringtone compatible and have the information stored in the microprocessor on which vibrations will create which sound.
An entire business has been formed around ringtones. There are numerous websites that offer ringtones for a fee and can make their money because of song royalty fees. There are also, ringtones that are free. These are usually older songs whose copyright has expired and are now public domain. Most of your favorite songs can be found as a ringtone.
It is easy to get a ringtone on your phone by searching the internet for a song you like and then downloading that song to your cell phone. The three most popular methods that exist are by using a USB cable, having the tone sent to your phone from the website or keying in the program straight into your phone. This is the newest way to get a ringtone. Most cell phones now come with a melody composer built into the phone. When in KEYPRESS SEQUENCE, the user can key in the ringtone. You can locate the sequence for each song on the internet which will tell you the order and speed at which to press in the tones. You can even customize it by altering the tones a bit.
What began as a simple monophonic tone is now polyphonic, which means that the song actually sounds like the song you hear on a CD or on the radio. You can record your own songs from Itunes or similar sites to use as your ringtone and assign different ringtones to different contacts in your phone. The ringtone has made its mark and continues to evolve as technology in our world evolves.