Ring tones, as Pop Music

How long did you spend picking out the ring tone for your phone? How many did
you go through to get the right mood? How often do you change that mood? Cell-phone
customers have spent more than $4 billion on ringtones. Most of these come from
popular hits, but a few are created especially for cell phone users as ringtones,
creating a new canvas for the musical artist to paint on.

Recognizing this MIT's Media Lab created
Hyperscore, a free songwriting software packaged designed to create, edit
and score ringtone music from 30 to 60 seconds in length. After releasing Hyperscore,
the MIT ringtone competition was born, bring hundreds
of artists together, offering an Avalon VIP key card, and $500 cash prize
donation to the MIT organization of the winners choice as first prize. U2's
Edge was a judge for
the contest.

Several of the more popular ringtones are featured on the website, which also
allows you to send the ones you like straight to your phone (if you have Cingular,
or Verizon as carriers, which I don't so that was a bummer). Or you can download
the Hyperplayer file and listen to them using the Hyperscore program. Apparently
you can not save these files as WAV or MP3 formats for any other program to
use or edit, which again was very disappointing. There is talk inside their
forum about having these features later, but at a $2 cost per ringtone, which
to me is rather silly. I'm suppose to create my own ringtone using their software,
but then I have to pay $2 to use my ring tone? I'm sure they'll see the business
crushing logic of that soon enough. Currently sending ringtones of your own
make or someone else's is free, to the phone (if you have Cingular or Verizon
... which I don't).

You are going to want to read the help files for the Hyperscore program. It
has a unique way of designing scores of music, which took me a while to figure
out. When you download the Hyperplayer files and open them in the Hyperscore
program, it starts getting confusing, as in "Okay, so how to I play this
thing." type of confusing. The window, amongst the windows, you are looking
for is called the "Sketch Window" which is the ringtone as a whole.
It will be a bit squarer than the others and much more colorful. The play arrow
is on the bottom left hand corner.

Coming from a history of MIDI and Reason, this program at first seemed rather
childish, but its looks are deceiving. The music you can create in this program
is quite amazing and once you get your head around how the composer area works,
it becomes very simple to get concept into reality, even for the non-musically
adept.

The artists ModularBlues and XT are definitely worth the time in checking out
on the website, as are several others.

There are several music file editors out there, the best one I've come across
is called Audacity. It also is
free and open source, but it is probably one of the best made music file editors
available. Now, get that straight, this is a file editor, not a music creator
or MIDI program. It allows you to mix and edit music files and to translate
the files from one format to another. Above that you want to get into Reason
for mixing and looping work.

Audacity, however, can take
your favorite song and format it down for uploading to your phone as a ringtone
very simply, and quickly. I'm always surprised at the speed and ease working
with files becomes in Audacity.

If you need to get your music off the CD and into a workable format, the CDEX
is the tool you are looking for there. CDEX
is again, an open source program of very high quality, which will take rip CD's
to MP3 or Wave format, which can then be edited for size and format in Audacity.

Propellerhead's Reason is by no
means opensource or free (in fact it is quite expensive), however if you are
looking for a music creation and loop program, then there isn't one out there
which can match it for effectiveness, ease of use and quality. I've looked over
several, and then shelled out the bucks for Reason. Time spent trying to get
others to work right can get expensive too.