A free ringtone is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming call. The term is most often used to refer to the customisable sounds available on mobile phones. The facility was originally provided so that people would be able to determine when their phone was ringing when in the company of other mobile phone owners.
free ringtones are one sector of the mobile music industry.
A phone only rings when a special "ring signal" is sent to it. For regular telephones, the ring signal is a 90-volt 20-hertz AC wave generated from the switch that the telephone is connected to. For mobile phones, the ring signal is a specific radio-frequency signal.
An alternative to a free ringtone is a vibrating alert. It is especially useful:
free ringtone advertising campaigns have become hugely popular, though they have also attracted a great deal of criticism.
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Early phones had the ability to play only monophonic free ringtones, short tunes played with simple tones. These early phones also had the ability to have free ringtones programmed into them using an internal free ringtone composer. Various formats were developed to enable free ringtones to be sent via text using RTTL encoding.
Polyphonic means that multiple tones can be played at the same time using instrument sounds such as guitar, drums, electronic piano, etc. Many phones are now able to play more complex polytones; up to 128 individual notes with different instruments are played simultaneously to give a more realistic musical sound. Mobile phone handsets manufacturers have taken full advantage of new technologies to improve speakers in order to produce a better sound quality.
A new version of free ringtones, often called either music free ringtones, voice tones, realtones, singtones or true tones, now use actual pieces of music, along with all lyrics and the entire song backing music, including backing singers. They are usually contained in MP3, WMA, WAV, QCP, or AMR format that can be used as a free ringtone on many Series 60, Symbian or smartphones. Many cell phone manufacturers are including voice free ringtones on most of their newly released phones, including Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.