Thursday, January 03, 2008

SGM pm3 Ringtones

Being a tech nerd and having the equipment to do so, I make my own mp3 ringtones because the ones you buy from the various providers often suck. Low quality compression and questionable clip selection usually makes them borderline unintelligble. Recently, it occurred to me that I could host ringtones here at SGM in a way that would allow people to download them directly to their phone via the WAP browser that pretty much all cellphones have these days. After a little research and work this evening, I was able to make that happen.

Because of obvious copyright issues as well as bandwidth limitations (I don't want the hosting wiped out with ringtone downloads since the backgrounds, header, and post expansion script is hosted on the webspace), I decided for the time being I'd limit it to Jake Palumbo ringtones. So for those of you with WAP-enabled cellphones that support mp3 ringtones, point your celly browser to

http://wap.sciencegonemad.com/index.wml

(Note the file extension is WML, not HTML like you're probably accustomed to. And that URL only works on WAP browsers, so if any of you are rockin' PDAs with full browser support, I don't know what to tell you. Actually, I do, but that will come later.)

Currently available is a 30 second clip from the remixed version of Radio One in two versions: a smaller, 200kb+ lo-fi mp3 and a larger 800kb+ hi-fi mp3. Obviously the hi-fi version sounds better and you can tell the difference even on the small speaker of a cellphone, but be aware that while there is no charge from SGM for the download, your wireless provider almost certainly will charge you for data usage. The charge is typically one cent per kilobyte downloaded, so that would put the larger version at around eight dollars in data charges making it the most expensive ringtone you'll ever buy.

(Also at issue is that most cellphones, like my current Nokia, have limited storage space, so you'll want to check your available memory before you try to download either of these. You should have room for the lo-fi, but the hi-fi version may be too large.)

The alternative to this is to download the mp3s to your PC and then transmit the ringtone to your phone via USB cable or bluetooth adapter. You can download the mp3s from these links:

Radio One (128kbps hi-fi)
Radio One (64kbps lo-fi)

If Jake is agreeable, I'll add a couple of ringtones from District Selectman soon.

If anyone has any questions about any of this, I'll do what I can to answer them, but I may not have answers for questions about specific cellphones that I'm not familiar with.

1 comment:

Nate said...

This is good news, seeing as how I just recently broke down and got my own cellphone, complete with its shitty selection of ringtones that I will have to eradicate.