It really was like that.

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Mp3? These young whippersnappers and their modern shenanigans. 8 bit MIDI is all the sound you'll ever need on your cellphone!
- 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.
  
  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.
- Polyphonic Ringtones? Ha! We had to type in some strange numbers to get beeps to change their tune!
  
  I tried so hard to figure that shit out but never managed to actually make anything good (I have zero musical talent), but we had this one friend in the group who had, so they'd always have one of our phones, composing our ringtones lol.. I feel old 😂
  
  Aww yeah that’s the tune to funky town
- 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.
  
  I had a midi background for my Angelfire web page.
- Name/link your 🔥 MIDIs
- I typed in some Wario Land music on my Nokia's 10-key pad. And then didn't use it because it sounded like ass.
- Of course, that's what he means with "converting to a ringtone"

Careful posting this sort of thing. You might accidentally summon the Crazy Frog, and then we'll all be sorry.
- The Annoying Orange has entered the chat
  
  Hey apple!

Bonus points if you transferred the file to your phone via IR.

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.
- Actually did this for O Green World by Gorillaz when I was 13 in '05. When the bill came in, my dad beat me senseless with those old jumper cables. Man, I loved that funky little ringtone.
  
  Two throwbacks in one.

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.
- Bluetooth...
  We had to align our phones and the stars to get irda working!
  
  That was the only way for me to get ringtones from my PC to my phone.
- brings back memories of studying in college while listening to 128k mp3's on my Sony CLIE with a massive 64mb memory stick.

I found a better quality image of this photo but I still don't have any idea what the hell is going on
- The person appears to be wearing a diaper. And in the top right corner there's a post with what appears to be Hebrew writing.
  In the right side of the picture there's a collection of remote controls and I've counted several phones and calculators scattered about.
  Given the disorganized appearance, and the 5 dollar headphones, I'll venture a guess that this person is not so much a professional anything, as much as a Middle Eastern hermit wackjob.
  
  Yeah, looks like an electronics hoarder. Each of those things at one time had a purpose, but 90% of it is sitting there unused and needs to be discarded/recycled.
- It's just a picture of my home lab.
  
  Looking nice bro!
- A lot of radio equipment.
  BBC News on the monitor.
  Maps of Iran on the wall.
  I'd bet on amateur/independent journalist picking up as much radio traffic as possible.
  
  Nah, that's a hoarder.
- Mickey Gurdus, an Israeli ham radio operator and media listener. In the age before the internet he used to listen to every transmission he could find from his homemade lab.
  
  Mickey Gurdus, Who Eavesdropped on the World
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srcN3KaTjd0
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://www.piped.video/watch?v=srcN3KaTjd0
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Air traffic control at home.
- You know it smell crazy in there

I used to have a different ring tone for every friend. I still think of them when I hear "their" song.

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.
- 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
  
  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.
- It's not idiotic, it's awesome! Of course I remember it, I had a great one.
  
  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)
- It's INSANELY popular in Iran and pushed hard by the service providers
- I actually called someone with one of these a few months ago. Blew my mind it still existed!

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

It's still like that with iphones

The Saw killer planning his next 10 films worth of traps.

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
- 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.

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 :)
- 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.

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

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

every time someone reposts this I wonder if this is one of those AI generated photos in which everything in the photo looks vaguely identifiable but it's not really identifiable because it's AI and not real. But the man is a man. I know that much.
- No I can see some stuff I can recognize
  
  ah ok

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