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.
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 😂
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.