Types, Format of Ringtones

Types of Ringtones

* Monophonic

A Monophonic ringtone is a ringtone that can play only one type of musical tone at a time.

* Polyphonic

A Polyphonic ringtone is a ringtone that can play several types of tones at a time (up to 72 in recent phones). 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.

* Realtone

A Truetone is a Ring tone which has been encoded with a high fidelity format such MP3, AAC, or WMA format, and represents the latest evolution of the ringtone. It is often also referred to as a Mastertone, a Realtone or a Superphonic Ringtone. Real tones, which are often excerpts from pop songs, have become popular as ringtones. A recent innovation is the singtone, whereby the user’s voice is recorded to a popular track and then “tuned-up” automatically to sound in key. This can then be downloaded as a ringtone or sent to another user’s mobile phone.


Ringtone formats

* eMelody - Older Ericsson format.
* iMelody - Most new phones that don't do Nokia's Smart Messaging are using this format.
* KWS - Kyocera's ringer format.
* MID / MIDI - Popular sound format.
* Morse code - Text files with a .MORSE extension get converted into morse code songs
* MOT - An older ringer format for Motorola phones.
* MP3 - Some phones support ringtones that are mp3 format.
* Nokia / SCKL / OTT - Nokia Smart Messaging format. Nokia phones can receive ringtones as a text message. Ringtone tools can create these text messages. This allows anyone with a compatible phone to load their own ringtones in without a data cable. There are other phones besides Nokia that use this.
* PDB - Palm database. This is the format used to load ringtones on PDA phones such as the Kyocera 6035 and the Handspring Treo
* QCP - File format generated by Qualcomm PureVoice software.
* RTTTL - A popular text format for ringtones.
* RTX - Similar to rtttl with some advanced features. Also the octaves are different on rtx.
* Samsung1 & Samsung2 - Samsung keypress format.
* Siemens Keypress - Can create and read in a Siemens text file format.
* Siemens SEO - Siemens SEO binary format.
* SMAF - Yamaha music format that combines MIDI with instrument sound data (ala Module files). Filenames have the extension "MMF."
* AAC - Some phones like the Sony Ericsson W810i support ring tones in ".m4a" AAC format.