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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't mention the elephant in the room - iPhone. The fall of ringtones and the rise of iPhone isn't a mere coincidence. The feature phones had too little features, everything on them was controlled by the provider, and thus ringtones were something noticeable, one of the few available ways for customization, a way for that brick to do something else. With introduction of iPhone the ring customization - just use any sound file, etc, no payment - became just a very small insignificant feature drowned by a lot of other functionality like full featured web browsing, etc. and thus it lost user's attention. I don't remember anybody doing ring customization on iPhone or any other smartphone besides picking from the preloaded list of rings.

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While I do agree the iPhone was the major cause, I think this was an intentional move by Apple. During the early years, iTunes let you make your own ringtones for free using songs in your library. GEICO even had a novelty ringtone online you could download to your iPhone for free. Eventually, Apple started selling premade ringtones (for the same price as the full song!), after which the built-in iTunes functionality was removed.

You can still make a ringtone for free by renaming an m4a to .m4r and then dragging it to your phone.

You can also make ringtones right on the phone using Garageband.

I think custom ring tones were on their way out before the first iPhone was released. Personally, hearing a portion of a song you love daily is the quickest way to ruin the song. Ring tones were a fad IMO. A piece of bling that wasn’t worth the cost.

> Personally, hearing a portion of a song you love daily is the quickest way to ruin the song.

I sort of agree with you. A few years ago, I joined a new team at work that had a really bad on-call rotation (lots of tech debt, bad TSGs, etc.). I got paged in the middle of the night many times, and I was always stressed about how the hell to resolve the issues. So I developed a bad stress reaction to my ringtone.

After I left that team, I changed my ringtone to the theme from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. It always makes me smile now when I get a phone call.

Ringtones didn't cost anything to anyone with 5 minutes which is all the time it took to take an MP3 and copy it to your phone. Songs getting tiresome isn't a problem when you can change it every week, but there's also no reason to limit yourself to songs either. Any sound or bit of audio can be saved as or converted to an MP3 and made into a ringtone. Personally, I'm fond sounds or BGM from video games and sound effects from old cartoons.

The reason is more that songs are really not a good fit for ringtone. The compositions, duration, melody, and sound must all be setup differently.

Plus, the iPhone shipped with its own, very distinguishable ringtones which pretty soon signaled to everyone “I have an iPhone”. And the small switch to silence it was already a feature on the first iPhone, became a standard for all smartphones and vibration only turned out to be a convenient alternative. That said, the current ringtones on my phone are: -Nokia Attraction -Nokia Orient -the ringtone from Luigis mansion 3 -You’re so cool from True Romance and yes, putting them on the phone with garage band is a pain.

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