Actually you just had to "play" it and lots of Nokias had a custom ringtone composer you could actually write ringtones with yourself.
So you'd just reserve an hour of computer time from the library, browse some guides on how to compose Axel F on a 3210, write them down/have it printed and then input them into your phone.
Are we talking about the button phones? Did they have different audio formats cuz their speakers were crappy or something (hence, no use playing high resolution audio)? Did the custom ringtones then sound bad as well?
I still have some 3gp/3gpp videos recorded on my old slide. What a pain. And I think depending on whether your phone was gsm/CDMA would affect whether it recorded to .3gp or .3g2.
Btw, is there still "call 01223344 to get that awesome ringtone!" telemarketing nowadays? It still was a few years ago, where i wondered why my mom would voluntarily see telemarketing.
My very first cell phone ever was a Danger Hiptop/Sidekick in 2002. It didn't need conversion. It just straight up used mp3s. 😎
I fought tooth and nail to get my parents to invest in cell phones when they were becoming ubiquitous around the time I started high school. They refused... Until I worked my ass off to buy my own and pay for my own service and they actually saw the benefit of being able to call me when they didn't know where I was. The Sidekick was the only one that had real internet browsing and not that WAP shit. I was also super into MUDS and it had an SSH client built in. Thing was slick. I kinda wish for an updated one that runs Android because I really miss having actual keyboard buttons.
Choose "browse files" or whatever similar title your version uses (on pixels it's a + symbol)
Find downloaded MP3 file, select
If you want to edit it down first then use either an app or Audacity on your PC
You can also use a file stored to Google Drive if you wanted to
I should also add this works for notification sounds. If you want custom alerts for different apps, or different contacts, or whatever you can also do that with this system.
My wifes texts are a FFXIV Moogle and her calls are music from the same game, for example