MIDI is the acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is by far the most popular ring tone format. A MIDI file contains the musical notes of a song instead of the actual audio recording. Therefore, MIDI files can be very small, which makes them ideal for mobile phone ring tones.
MIDI songs are music only. MIDI cannot reproduce the human voice or other sounds that cannot be represented by musical notes.
The musical notes in a MIDI file are divided into several parallel channels. When a MIDI player plays the file, it simulates a different musical instrument for each channel and plays all the channels simultaneously. That produces the effect of a whole band playing the song together. Obviously, the more channels you have in a MIDI file, the better it sounds.
Many free MIDI files for popular songs are available on the Internet. However, most MIDI files you download cannot be used as ring tones because most free MIDI files have more than 256 channels. A Nokia mobile phone can play only 424 notes at a time due to hardware limitations. The Nokia Sound Converter program in the Nokia PC Suite allows you to reduce the number of channels on any MIDI file and create Scalable Polyphony MIDI (SP-MIDI) files that are suitable for a selected Nokia device. Using this tool, you can define channel priorities for the conversion, which specifies which channels to play and which channels to omit.
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