I have said enough about ring tones, which you hear when people call you. The latest twist in the ring tone fad is to use ring back tones, which are also known as caller tones. They are the tones your callers hear when your phone rings, instead of the "ring, ring" they usually hear. This is a great way to entertain your friends and show your taste to your callers. To use this service, your wireless operator must support it. You can purchase ring back tones from your operator's portal site. However, if you change your operator later, all your ring back tones will be lost.
Compared with MIDI music, MP3 songs make much more impressive ring tones. MP3 files can incorporate human voices and other sound effects. Most important of all, you probably already have your favorite music collection in MP3 format.
Unfortunately, most Nokia phones cannot use MP3 files directly as ring tones. The hack here is to first convert MP3 music to Audio/Modem Riser (AMR) or WAV audio files, which Nokia devices do support. The AMR and WAV files can hold the same type of sound as MP3 files, but the former are less compressed.
You have to be careful with the size of the AMR and WAV files. A full-length song in .wav format can be more than 50 MB. That is much larger than the memory space of most Nokia phones. I recommend you convert only a 5 to 10 second clip of your favorite MP3 song into an AMR/WAV ring tone.
The Nokia Multimedia Converter is a standalone application outside of the Nokia PC Suite. It converts a variety of PC audio/video formats to mobile phone formats. Also, it supports MP3-to-AMR conversion. You can download the Nokia Multimedia Converter program for free from Forum Nokia (http://www.forum.nokia.com/).
Also, many MP3-to-WAV file converter programs are available on the Internet as shareware or freeware. For instance, the very popular and free MP3 player, Winamp (http://www.winamp.com/), can export MP3s to .wav files.
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.
On most Nokia devices, you can specify a different ring tone for each profile. On a Series 60 device, you can just open the Profiles application and select the Options>Personalize menu. When you open the "Ringing tone" item, you are presented with a list of all audio files stored in the device (i.e., in the Gallery). You can choose any of these audio files as the default ring tone for this profile.
Your phone should have come with quite a few ring tones pre-installed. To hear a ring tone, scroll to it in the list and pause for a few seconds.
On a Series 40 device, you can select a profile from the Settings Profiles menu and then select Options>Personalize to change ring tones. If you want to select a ring tone from an audio file in the phone's default Gallery folder, choose the Open>Gallery item in the list of available ring tones.
On Series 40 devices, you can use the Settings>Tone settings menu to customize ring tones and alert settings for a currently active profile. On some devices, you can also navigate directly to an audio file in the Gallery and then set it as the ring tone for the current profile via the Options menu.
