Ringtones tend to split a crowd. For some they are a wonderful hors d’oeuvre in the buffet of life, for others a horrible fly in the soup of urban existence.
If you insist on rockin’ a party every time your mum rings to tell you your tea is ready, why not step outside your musical comfort zone and check out Toneshared? Toneshared bills itself as “The world’s most interesting collection of mobile phone tones” and features downloads in MP3 format from a selection of alternative/electronica artists.
I recognised a few names (Atom Heart being probably the most famous) although the list does seem to be a bit heavy on the northern european ambient techno side. The quality is generally pretty good, though. Certainly it is a welcome break from Crazy Frog, that one that goes Diddle-oo-doo Diddle-oo-doo Diddle-oodoo-der and the latest R’n'B ‘flava’.
Best of all, you can afford to experiment - all the tones are downloadable for the low, low price of nothing at all. Now you have no excuse for not trying out a tone by the wonderfully named ‘Vulva String Orchestra’.
If you use your phone to play MP3 files - either music or recorded ‘dictaphone’ clips - or if you like using music clips as ringtones, then this could be for you.
MP3Cube is a free utility for S60 phones that is basically a scaled-down audio editor, The app lets you chop up MP3 files into smaller chunks (useful for grabbing the intro to a song for use as a ringtone, for example).
MP3Cube also lets you downsample MP3 files - this just means reducing the audio quality of the track to make a smaller file. This is particularly useful for spoken word tracks as the space savings can be significant without losing much in the way of audible quality.
Information about track length, ID3 tags, etc can also be viewed using the app, and it also works as an MP3 player of course.
Because this is running on a low powered smartphone, rather than a desktop PC, things can be a little slow - particularly on longer tracks - but for short editing tasks on the move this is a useful app and worth a download.
Something I’ve been wondering ever since Apple announced its iPhone SDK was whether it’ll allow rival music stores like Amazon and eMusic to launch apps for the iPhone to sell their music. In an ideal world, Apple would welcome the competition and be confident that iTunes will be able to take them on, but something tells me it might take the alternative approach and ban them.
However, some people are working on the idea in a distinctly unofficial style. Someone’s created a native iPhone app called iPhone Music Center, which lets you browse songs from Amazon’s US-based MP3 store on your iPhone, then buy and download them. Amazon sells DRM-free MP3s, so in theory they play on the iPhone without any problems.
This is an issue to watch, since it would make sense for rival stores to try and compete with iTunes on the iPhone itself, but Apple’s policy remains to be seen.
iPhone Music Center website (via iPhone World)
