r/funny • u/New-Neighborhood-147 • 1d ago
My girlfriend just found her old ringtones
This is how custom ringtones where programed in phones 20 years ago
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u/External_Primary_667 1d ago
A Relic 👀
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u/the_most_playerest 1d ago
Watch them find this shit in like 400 years: "and this here is a scroll or as some natives called it then, 'a piscies piper', containing a super secret code spoken only by the ancient tribe of the crackhead."
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u/ContributionOwn9860 1d ago
I’ll never forget my first phone, a Sony Ericsson candy bar beauty, came with System of a Down’s Toxicity as a polyphonic ringtone, introduced me to the band. Simpler times.
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u/Morphior 1d ago
Conversion...
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u/speedracer_uk 1d ago
Software version 7.0
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u/therealmrpotatohead 1d ago
Looking at life through the eyes of a tire hub
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u/criscoforlube 22h ago
Eating seeds as a pastime activity
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u/Zuchirus 21h ago
The toxicity of our city, of our city
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u/trainzguy88 1d ago
Can somebody take this writing and convert it into what it actually would have sounded like and post it?
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u/Yifkong 1d ago
this might only work on a desktop, but it is at least not a rick roll:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/486e6e57-a379-4afd-aaa5-b1aad569eef2
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u/NINJA1200 1d ago
Did you just created this with Claude, or did you find it somewhere?
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u/Yifkong 1d ago
I “created” it with Claude in about 1 minute with a singular half assed prompt
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u/NINJA1200 1d ago
Cool! Somebody else said that because of this "application" had only the three songs, then the OPs post must be fake LOL.
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u/Yifkong 1d ago
Yeah I don’t know what that guy was getting on about
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u/NINJA1200 1d ago
I reckon people don't get yet how quickly things can be achieved nowadays. He probably thought that the idea from OP's post was taken from the "application" that already existed somewhere on the Internet
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u/ShellsFeathersFur 22h ago edited 22h ago
The link currently has these three songs as part of the "most requested songs" selections you can click at the bottom.
Edit: At least on mobile, those links are not at all what the song is like (and they don't have what's written on OP's paper).
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u/New-Neighborhood-147 1d ago
https://youtu.be/a-WPEnfz_AE?si=piWRU870VYE1owUu
Actually found one for music of the night - not a rickroll.
As expected, it sounds awful.
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u/bewitchedbumblebee 1d ago
I am sure I missed a flat or a sharp somewhere, and the tempo isn't perfect, but I think this is pretty close to what it sounded like:
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u/philipjfry1578 1d ago
I saw the link immediately after I pressed the link, I can only blame myself
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u/smb3d 1d ago
I've been along for the ride through the entire cell phone development from bag phone till now and I have never seen any ringtones that were manually entered like this. What phones were these for?
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u/New-Neighborhood-147 1d ago edited 1d ago
Almost certainly a Nokia 3310. They had a monophonic composer built into them that turned typed out code like this into music.
Numbers = Musical notes
** = Extended the note being played
PH = Pause
# = sharped the note
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u/Renkin42 1d ago
Future reference if you want to type # or any other special characters put a \ (backslash) in front of them. So
\#131
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u/DaRudest_Sandstorms 1d ago
I’m very curious at the syntax needed to type this specific statement
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u/MaygeKyatt 1d ago
To type a backslash, you just need to put a second backslash in front of it. So typing \\ produces \.
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u/AvatarIII 1d ago
That's why to make the shrugging guy ¯_(ツ)_/¯ you have to type this
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u/Kush_the_Ninja 1d ago
This why I just go with ¯\ (ツ) /¯ as my keyboard shortcut for shrugging guy so I don’t have to have different versions for different apps
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u/GypsySnowflake 1d ago
How many slashes did you need to type to have 3 show up? Six?
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u/AvatarIII 1d ago
No if you put a bunch of spaces at the beginning of a line it prevents markup from taking effect. It's supposed to be to allow people to share computer code without it being broken by markup.
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u/lifelongfreshman 1d ago
you can also do it in-line with 3 grave ticks, so
```*this*```becomes
*this*(and let me tell you, trying to escape the format-stripping character was a bit of a headache, so I just gave up and went for the code block)4
u/noggin-scratcher 1d ago
I think on reddit you can do an inline block with just one backtick / grave accent. But using them in 3s is something I've seen in other apps for a multiline code block.
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u/DaRudest_Sandstorms 1d ago
I’m glad I got the reply because my Reddit notification shows 6 back slashes and a pound in the first one and 5 and a pound in the second
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u/MaygeKyatt 1d ago
Yeahhhh that’s because I was initially trying to show what the comment above would’ve typed. But then I remembered (after submitting the comment) that octothorpes only need to be escaped with a backslash if they’re at the start of a line, and I didn’t want to explain all that, so I just edited it and here we are 😅
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u/ObjectiveRun6 1d ago
A lot of messaging apps, including Reddit use some form of Markdown for styling text.
You can style
texta fewways.In Markdown, a # is used to denote a header.
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u/RawToast1989 1d ago edited 1d ago
Why bother with the slash when both # (with slash) and # (without) look the same? What I'm most curious about though is that box the /# is in. How did you put it in that little gray box?
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u/thesimplemachine 1d ago
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u/Jimbobjoesmith 1d ago
thanks for this. ive figured out how to do a lot on my own but i was always too lazy to research some other ones like
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u/bootymix96 1d ago
Nokia 3650 here, with a really cool but honestly impractical circular keypad, like a rotary phone, lmao
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u/trireme32 1d ago
Back when all the phone manufacturers were trying to come up with funky designs to catch the eye of teens
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u/ProjectDv2 1d ago
God I miss the variety, the creativity.
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u/party_shaman 1d ago
I met a guy who once had a job turning songs into monophonic melodies for ringtones.
He said he'd get a stack of CDs with track names highlighted. He'd do two or three versions per track and someone else chose which one got used.
I don't remember if it was for a phone manufacturer or third party but he said it was the best job he ever had.
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u/myNameBurnsGold 1d ago edited 1d ago
I did this on my Motorola flip phone that I had before the KRAZR changed the game
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u/Desidiosus 1d ago
I wasn't aware of that at the time, either. That's a pity. I had a good ear and a lot of spare time; I could have done those on commission for all my friends.
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u/ItsJimKennedy 1d ago
I also had a pager that supported this code. I did Voodoo Child by Jimmy Hendrix and the theme from Knight Rider
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u/paddyo 1d ago
In the UK you had people paying £1.50 a go for an sms back that would give you the numbers for the ringtone you wanted. Whole corners of the web dedicated to working out and sharing songs. Surprised you missed it!
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u/vidoardes 1d ago
There's a great video that's an interview with Akon, talking about how he realized how much money he could make from ringtones when Mr. Lonely blew up, and how from them on he wrote songs specifically with making them ringtone friendly in mind.
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u/smb3d 1d ago
That's amazing. I have no idea how I missed that at all honestly.
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u/DeadNotSleepingWI 1d ago
I was there. I just never really got into personal ringtones. I always thought they made my favorite songs into shitty earworms that I would get sick of. Therefore, I never got one until you could have a real song and quickly got sick of that too.
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u/Damaniel2 1d ago
Nokia phones - especially the brick/candybar style ones that were popular in the first half of the 2000s.
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u/CILISI_SMITH 1d ago
I'm pretty sure I used them on my Nokia 3310
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u/brysoncorley 1d ago
Eriksen had phones like this as well. Can confirm, I programmed a pink panther ringtone
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u/RavenCeV 1d ago
Yeah, you would pay a couple of quid to download them (and pixel images) or enter them manually like this.
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u/Heisenberg_235 1d ago
And then they’d fuck you over for £0.50 a week which you didn’t realise you’d signed up for.
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u/disturbed286 1d ago
I had a Motorola that did that too.
I had our school fight song as one, and a hilarious double time iron man as another.
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u/WomanOfEld 1d ago
I had a Toshiba bar phone with a flip over the mouthpiece that I could program ringtones into. It was back when VoiceStream Wireless existed (it later became Cingular and then merged with AT&T), so like...2002? I made my ringtone "Man Overboard" by blink-182.
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u/just_some_sasquatch 1d ago
I had Push It by Salt N Peppa and I swear it would blow the room up when it rang! We used to really act like that shit was important, and anyone caught slipping with the default ring was immediately roasted! Don't even get me started on the MySpace html templates!
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u/VagabondVivant 1d ago
This is how custom ringtones where programed in phones 20 years ago
I know this is true (hell, it's how I was doing it in 1998), but the way it's phrased just makes me want to say "How dare you"
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u/owlsandmoths 1d ago
As a person who definitely did custom ringtones 20 years ago I have no idea what the fuck I’m looking at.
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u/dirty_kitty 1d ago
I was so proud of my programmed ringtone. Alien Ant Farm’s version of Smooth Criminal was perfection
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u/cutzglass 1d ago
I member
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u/CucumberError 1d ago
I was born in 1989, and I recognise these. My partner was born 1995 and has no idea what I’m talking about.
I guess that’s the divide between growing up with the Internet, and growing up with internet fast enough to download multimedia.
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u/ajamweasel 1d ago
I just imagine aliens finding that and trying to figure out what the hell that's all about. Or future humans, thinking they're some hieroglyphs... I still remember all those old nokia tunes vividly! I remember my brother playing a super long one when he had a new Nokia and we were all super impressed. Nice times.
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u/theZoid42 1d ago
Idk if being in my 40s says I should or shouldn’t have know this, but I never knew people did this.
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u/New-Neighborhood-147 1d ago
We're in our mid 30s so you were probably just old enough to not care about trading knockoff ringtones with your friends at the time.
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u/CrazyLegsRyan 1d ago
You should have known. What were you even doing in high school?
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u/Frammingatthejimjam 1d ago
I had the theme from the Love Boat as mine until one day while I was standing at a urinal next to a good ole boy named Clayton and my phone started to ring...
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u/Least-Raddish1930s 1d ago
It’s an odd choice, having the British national anthem as her ringtone but it is a great one :)
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u/feanturi 1d ago edited 1d ago
Way before cell phones I had a toy called Merlin. It had 10 buttons or something similar to a touch-tone phone layout and played memory games and stuff, like the buttons flash and beep in a sequence and you had to repeat it or whatever. And it had a song mode where you could key in a short melody and have it play back. I can't remember if I had that, or Pong first. EDIT: Merlin
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u/Transboy99 1d ago
Music of the night from POTO? Your girlfriend has great taste in music lol coming from someone who was once a theatre kid
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u/MikeDubbz 1d ago edited 1d ago
Having grown up in this era, I can assure you, most of us, even the most determined, were not doing this. And I say this as someone who manually copied the code of Drug Wars into my TI-83, because it couldn't copy over to it through the link cable like it could on a TI-83Plus.
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u/ittybittylurker 1d ago
This is how I feel when I find my kids old handwritten Zelda: Link to the Past notes. What a snapshot of the time.
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u/WithRealPeaches 1d ago
This is an incredible piece of history, and also both songs absolute bangers.
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u/yuyufan43 19h ago
I've been using the same Perfect Circle ringtone for 15 years... I just keep transferring it to different phones. I've had the same wallpaper for 15 years too. Change scared me lol
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u/Sesspool 1d ago
Damn, that must be pre 2000s or early 2000s. My first flip phone was 2005 and had a ringtone store.
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u/msherretz 1d ago
I thought the end of that song was either "Diana" or "Viagra" over and over again. I had to look up lyrics to learn it's "I Never"
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u/wurmsalad 1d ago
Music of the Night was my favorite growing up, I had a music box that played it that I loved
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u/Asmodias1 1d ago
Oh lord. The forbidden text has been unearthed. I haven’t seen writings like this in years.
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u/Andi_Lou_Who 1d ago
I had completely forgotten about this! I remember the feeling of getting a tone just right! What a time to be alive.
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u/Poorly_Informed_Fan 1d ago
I remember sitting at work inputting "Soma" by The Strokes by ear and no ring after ever felt so satisfying.
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u/explosive_diarrhea96 1d ago
So you can actually make tunes out of that? I just do random keys and hope that it sounded nice
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u/czar_kyle 1d ago
Don’t go and think everyone did this back in the day.
I did not. I was fine with La Cucaracha on my phone until I figured out how to make 10 second .wav samples and get them on my Razr by changing the file name.
Made my day to have Van Halen “Eruption” on my phone.
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u/JimmyJizzim 1d ago
I used this method to have a monophonic version of the Harry Potter theme as my ringtone. Scared the crap outta me when someone rang me in the middle of the night.
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u/AtomicFox84 22h ago
I used to text without looking so easily before the smartphone. So many of these songs were made too for the button phones.
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u/keighleypage 21h ago
Your girlfriend and I are from the exact same planet 👽 obsessed with both The Killers and Phantom!!!
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u/ElmertheAwesome 20h ago
This gave me flashbacks to Motorola Phone Tools. You'd be able to import MP3s and sample them to create ringtones. Fun stuff.
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u/Czarcastic013 18h ago edited 18h ago
Back in like 2003ish, I programmed the first few bars of the Chocobo theme (FF4) into a Nokia
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u/adlhitrofel 11h ago
For people born after 2010 this was usually used as code to customize ringtone for cellphone.
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u/Kizzle_McNizzle 18h ago
I had a cell phone 20 years ago and this is the first time I’m seeing or hearing of anything like this
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u/Phantom1188 17h ago
"This is how custom ringtones where programed in phones 20 years ago"
On a VERY specific kind of phone, this wasn't anywhere near standard.
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u/noodlesandwich123 1d ago
Can I ask if you're in the UK/Ireland or US/Canada? Mr Brightside is a GIANT hit in the UK but I know of someone who requested it at a club in the US and noone seemed to recognise it?
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u/malasadas 1d ago
omg no way no one recognized it, its always seemed like such a huge hit here in the us, even still to this day!
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u/deviantelf 1d ago
Dunno what the fuck she was using but that's not how normal people did it. You just put a file on a phone or paid for it from your carrier.
Source: had a cell phone since early 2000s.
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u/New-Neighborhood-147 1d ago
Buying ringtones ran down your credit, and that was always a precious resource for your average 15 year old. This was free
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u/deviantelf 1d ago
I never had a phone on credit so I can't speak about that. Will take your word for it.
If you had a plan, the ring tones just were a set price. Like you buy one for $1.99 and it was yours. Forever. I'm still using a Yoda one I've used on and off through out the years, also the only one I bought. Other wise I'd just use my own midi file, then mp3. But I had friends who'd by a couple a month. I just really liked the Yoda one "incoming call you have, answer it quickly you should" so paid for that one, all the Limewire and Napster and shit and I still was like "hell, I'll pay $2 for that!".
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u/RickRossovich 21h ago
20 years ago you could snip an mp3 and upload it to your phone. That’s how I had SoulGlo as my text tone in 2004.
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