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Monophonic ringtones

Early phones had the ability to play only monophonic ringtones, short tunes played with simple tones. These early phones also had the ability to have ringtones programmed into them using an internal ringtone composer. Various formats were developed to enable ring tones to be sent via SMS text, for example RTTTL encoding.

Polyphonic ringtones

Mobile phone handsets manufacturers have taken full advantage of new technologies to improve speakers in order to produce better sound quality from ringtones. Polyphonic ringtones are based upon midi sequences so can pool in the 100+ different midi sounds, many polyphonic capable phones are able to play standard midi files, others play sp-midi which is scalable polyphony and depending on the number of channels the phone can play the handset will render that many notes. On an old polyphonic capable phone may play 4 notes at once with the flashier new handsets being able to render 128 notes at once. Many phones support SMAF (.mmf) files which is based upon a sound format devised by Yamaha.

Music ringtones

A new version of ringtones, often called either music ringtones, voice tones, mastertones, realtones, singtones or true tones, now use actual pieces of music, along with all lyrics and the entire song backing music, including backing singers. Many cell phone manufacturers are including voice ring tones on most of their newly released phones, including Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. The first real music ringtone was created by Richard Fortenberry and Brad Zutaut and was sent over the Sprint network. They were two of the founders of a company called Xingtone. It was from a song by the band Devo.

However, newer phones equipped with Bluetooth or PC-link up allow users to transfer ringtones created on a PC to their phone for free. The user could even record themselves or their own tones and download them to the phone.

In Germany, ringtones are heard so frequently that some species of birds are imitating them!