My cellphone expired, so I was poking around here and there on the net looking for something unlocked in a GSM flavor; but one of my key criteria is big buttons that I can see without my reading-glasses, and the Web just doesn’t help you there. I ended up at a local grey-market emporium where a friendly Russian sold me a Samsung SGH-D600; it definitely meets the no-reading-glasses criterion and seems like a pretty nice phone. This cute little slidey black goober lets you use any old MP3 as a ringtone. Given that most of us have tons o’ music on our computers, and it’s pretty easy to slice out a sub-ten-second clip and Bluetooth it over to the phone, I guess the ring-tones business is dead. It seems obvious to me that using music I’ve already paid for in this way is Fair Use, but I bet there’s a lawyer somewhere who’d disagree for a fee. So I sat up late one evening cackling fiendishly over the audio software, and my ringtones are: Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme (the classic Ray Anthony version of course), the opening sequences of Burning Spear’s Slavery Days and Deep Purple’s Highway Star (off Made in Japan), and the closing seconds of Runaway Horses from Phil Glass’ wonderful Mishima soundtrack. Now, whenever the phone rings, I smile.
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Comment feed for ongoing:
From: dr2chase (Oct 27 2006, at 17:51)
I did bird sounds. I even contacted the guys who recorded the CD, to see if they had any interest in doing something more organized or allowing me to do something more organized, but no dice. So fair use, here we go.
Phone speakers do an excellent job with bird sounds.
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From: Anthony B. Coates (Oct 28 2006, at 02:20)
I've been using my own home-written ringtones for some years now (ever since I had a phone that played MIDI). It's a challenge to write something get's your attention when it kicks off but doesn't leave your co-workers thinking about how much they would like to flush your phone.
Cheers, Tony.
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