I'm not going to talk about the history of ringtones and how cool is to personalize every aspect of your cellphone.
There are other persons who do.
Instead, I'll be explaining what poly tones really are and why are we calling them by this name.
You see, in the 90's hard disks were small and computing power ridiculously limited, compared to these days.
A sound card was not very common, and "multimedia" meant full colour pictures.
This is not the history of personal computers, either.
I'm just trying to emphasize a few things.
Real sounds could not be played on average computers back in the 90's.
This, and the pre-existing music hardware industry lead to MIDI format being implemented in soundcards.
MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.
The technology uses an electronic musical notation to store songs.
When playing back a MIDI song, the hardware (e.
g.
the soundcard or ...
the phone) reads musical notes and generates corresponding sounds.
The MIDI files contain multiple tracks.
This way complex songs may be played, using more than one musical instrument.
This was ideal for the 90s technology, when PC games were shipped on floppy disks and size did matter more than today.
MIDI files are quite small, because they contain notation, not recorded sounds.
A recorded (waveform) sound contains thousands of frequency values for each second (44,000 if sampled at 44kHz).
A midi file may contain 200 music notes in a fraction of the waveform size.
The limitation is a MIDI can only store notes.
No voices, no sound effects.
Anyway, what's the idea? Well, most computer games and music hardware were using MIDI as the preferred way to store and play music.
This means there are more than 10 years since the MIDIs have been around.
And better yet, thousands of them may be found on the Internet.
This is due to music enthusiasts (both music professionals and karaoke fans) who recreated many popular songs in the MIDI format.
Oh, and what does "multiple tracks" mean? Poyphony, i.
e.
more sounds at the same time.
Nowadays,the 90's PC computing power fits in a pocket.
No wonder they call the pocket PCs "PCs".
And all the MIDI stuff can be easily played by a PDA or a cellphone.
This is were "polyphonic ringtones" come into play.
That's why poly tones have no voice tracks and they fit on low-memory phones (we're talking kilobytes).
And that's why many of them remind you ofgood ol' DOS games (if you're old enough) So go ahead and search "MIDI download" or "MIDI database"on the Internet.
You'll find loads of phone-ready songs out there.
All free, incrediblysmall-sized, and royalty-free for personal use.
You will, of course, need a cable to transfer those ringtones to your phone, if you downloaded using your PC.
Usually an USB or bluetooth adapter does the trick.
If you're using a modern Internet enabled phone, just browse the MIDI ringtones directly from your mobile device and enjoy your favorite music.
Note that you will most likely need an HTTP capable browser, because not all websites are WAP enabled.
Now go ahead and stun your friends with your MIDI phone ringtones and tell them about your MIDI secret.
Test before bragging, because some phones only play proprietary format, non-MIDI files.