• Norgur@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    Mp3? These young whippersnappers and their modern shenanigans. 8 bit MIDI is all the sound you’ll ever need on your cellphone!

    • BruceTwarzen@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      I actually made some cash in 8th grade making ringtones. All i did is looking up what buttons to press on the 3210 on the internet. The weird part was that pretty much strangers would just give me their phone over night because i was too lazy to print it out and do it in school. Rumours were around that i had some weird ass set-up at home like deadmau5 to turn axel f into a midi. I was just using altavista and pressed buttons.

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        That pre internet era was amazing … that sweet spot where the internet was just starting to grow but not everyone had it yet.

        My brother had a thriving business at around 1997 1998 1999 ripping custom CDs for people. He kept a library of 40 GB hard drive of mp3 and everyone thought he was a god that could make custom music CDs. I played a few of them a while ago and they are absolute crap but at the time no one cared what they sounded like as long as it was new and customized to what they wanted.

        The amazing thing was, his business appeared and disappeared in a matter of about two years. One moment everyone wanted him … then everything and everyone moved on and his business was done.

        • LastYearsPumpkin@feddit.ch
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          9 months ago

          Crazy thing is… that’s what Trevor Noah did as a youth in South Africa. Had a whole bootleg CD burning business until his setup died and they couldn’t get the files back.

          So he turned his life around and became extremely famous in the US.

        • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Those were the days. I impressed people in my high school by being able to switch between music really fast… They were used to CDs, and here I was rocking winamp on win98 with 60gig of mp3s. Most of them poorly produced “weird al” songs with obscene lyrics I had gotten on napster and kazaa.

    • NessD@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Polyphonic Ringtones? Ha! We had to type in some strange numbers to get beeps to change their tune!

    • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      I used to have the Monkey Island intro midi as a ringtone. It would start real quiet giving me time to either go somewhere I can talk or if I just wouldn’t notice it would become loud enough to notice later.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    9 months ago

    Careful posting this sort of thing. You might accidentally summon the Crazy Frog, and then we’ll all be sorry.

  • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Converting and downloading ringtones was such a pain. It was almost worth paying $2.99 plus $20 in data charges for a 30 second clip that sounds like it’s playing on a victrola.

  • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    I kinda miss swapping mp3s via Bluetooth on my flipphone at lunch, because we only had the space for 3-4 of em, so you had to swap with friends to get fresh music throughout the week.

  • deo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 months ago

    y’all remember the “ring back” tones? i don’t think they ever really took off since they are a ring tone that people hear when they call you instead, which is… just… totally idiotic… but i did encounter it a few times in the wild.

      • deo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        But… you never get to hear it because when do you ever call yourself? So it’s just subjecting everyone else to a song that they may not even like… And besides, the quality was like listening to an underwater phonograph cylinder.

        (obviously don’t know your music taste; you may actually have had a great song of decent quality. but i wouldn’t trust everyone with that power lol)

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I had something like Danger Zone, or Eye of the Tiger, to get people pumped up when they called me. I don’t remember exactly, but I thought it was fun. Nobody cared if it’s a good song. It was just a neat little gimmick at a distinct moment in time.

    • acceptable_humor@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I guess its gone from America but it is still very popular in india … partly because the Network Providers give it as a free feature … neat cause my friends never pick up quickly

      • deo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        Is the quality not trash anymore? Maybe it’s gotten better and i didn’t notice, but music over the telephone has always sounded muddy and distorted to me.

  • MrTHXcertified@lemdro.id
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    9 months ago

    Real nerds learned how to create SP-MIDIs and structured them to degrade gracefully no matter how limited your phone’s synth chip was.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    In some ways though that was kind of part of the fun. You had to really want the song to be willing to do that lol

    • rgb3x3@beehaw.org
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      9 months ago

      And after a month, you realized that you Pavloved yourself into thinking your phone was ringing and hating the song when you heard it casually.

      It’s like using your favorite song as an alarm. Don’t know how that doesn’t ruin those songs for people.

  • Magister@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Yup, on my Audiovox 8910, using a special USB cable and some obscure qualcom softwares, to access the “file system” and put a wav at the right place, and it had to be mono 8bits or something.

    I didn’t want to pay $5 for a 10 seconds ringtones sample of a song. I did it myself :)

    • r00ty@kbin.life
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      9 months ago

      The problem was that every phone needed its own cable and software. I bought the entire Nokia set since it was barely any more than a single cable and just did ringtones/custom screens etc for everyone I knew.

  • M500@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    I remember programming the songs by pressing the buttons in the right order from some website.

  • JohnWorks@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    Unless it’s changed recently I still had to do that for whenever I used my iPhone. Couldn’t get audio to be a ringtone and had to run iTunes and do some conversion weirdness.

    • oozynozh@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      iPhone is pretty weak for that but you can also use Garageband on your phone to do the conversion.