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anonymous 13 January 2006

i make electronica using one workstation and ive been trying to achieve the best sounding ringtone for my cell phone that i can. I have had some success (making and uploading ringtones) but all sound like sh*t... how do they do it?

Comments

IIRs Tue, 01/17/2006 - 03:26

You can squeeze some extra level out of the file by removing the low frequencies that the handset speaker can't cope with: Try a gentle 1 pole highpass filter set around 350Hz. This will give you some extra headroom (how much depends on the mix and the genre) which you can take up with a brick wall limiter.. and, unless the original was already limited to death, you can probably go a lot further and squash the peaks pretty hard as this will help it to be audible when ringing in your pocket. (Ringtones are meant to sound annoying after all!)

Have you tried an mp3 file at all? If it can play that (and also assign it to a ringtone) then that is probably your best bet from a quality point of view: the smaf format (.mmf files) is based around Yamaha's FM synth chips, and the audio support seems a little tacked-on.. lets face it: 4 bit ADPCM @ 8KHz is never going to sound that great.. :wink:

Thomas W. Bethel Tue, 01/17/2006 - 05:58

IIRs wrote: I hate to remind you, but ringtones have been outselling CD singles for some time (at least here in the UK)

Like it or not, the punters are willing to pay more for 4 bit ADPCM ringtones than for 16-bit CDs with artwork. :roll:

WEll good for the ringtones. It still has NOTHING to do with audio mastering which is what this forum is about.

IIRs Tue, 01/17/2006 - 06:06

You start with a high resolution audio file. You trim the length down to size, manipulate the frequency balance and dynamic range to fit better into the intended playback medium, then re-sample / dither & truncate and convert to various consumer formats ready for distribution.. what would you call it? ;)

Thomas W. Bethel Tue, 01/17/2006 - 06:15

IIRs wrote: You start with a high resolution audio file. You trim the length down to size, manipulate the frequency balance and dynamic range to fit better into the intended playback medium, then re-sample / dither & truncate and convert to various consumer formats ready for distribution.. what would you call it? ;)

You win!

but.....

This is what audio mastering is all about....(Dead Link Removed) and this person wrote the book on mastering and I don't find any references to ring tones in his book.

IIRs Tue, 01/17/2006 - 06:23

:lol:

I don't even need to click that link to know that's Bob Katz's site, 'cos he's my hero and his book is my bible!

Unfortunately no-one is currently offering me mastering work on his level, but I did earn a steady income from ringtones for a few years. I bet I know more about "mastering" for mobile phones than Bob does :twisted:

IIRs Wed, 01/18/2006 - 05:30

I am guessing you are not comparing like with like. 4 bit ADPCM is not really capable of sounding "clean", especially at 8KHz.

Audio ringtones come in a plethora of different formats such as amrnb, amrwb, xmf, rmf, mp3 and wav. Any of them would be a better choice than smaf (which is geared mainly towards midi and FM synthesis) but it depends what your handset supports. Try a wav file, you never know!

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